In the Chambers of the Sea
by MostRemote
Summary: A decade after high school, Jounouchi has a chance encounter with Kaiba. Neither is happy to see the other, or indeed happy about anything, but sometimes you have to take a step backwards to keep moving forwards.
1. Same as It Ever Was

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea  
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown  
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

 _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_ , T. S. Eliot

 **Warnings: Language, drug use, mild violence**

* * *

Sunset on a Friday was a kind of witching hour in downtown Domino, and most of all in November. The days were too short and the nights stretched out into a frenzy of drinking and three day parties that everybody wanted to end but didn't. Everyone got that little bit crazier, more excited, more ready for violence. November nights in the city were a different kind of time, a different kind of place, lit by fluorescence and dread.

It was a sort of home, a sort of nightmare.

Jounouchi woke when the sun set, at five PM, and he lay on his bed and listened to the lattice of sirens and shouts and traffic curl about him for several long minutes. His back was sore and his skull still rattled with yesterday's hangover, and his mouth was coated with dry moss. Somewhere a car alarm was shrieking.

His sleep-clumsy fingers located his phone and brought it to his eyes. One hour before he had to be at work, and no messages. He replaced the phone.

Sitting upright sharpened his migraine into metal. Around him the room was blue and amber, weirdly underwater and sick-looking, the shadows cast by streetlights and a crowd of downtown neon. Someone in the street was screaming, not in panic, but in that ill-defined distress of drunks and mad people. It broke unevenly with the rhythm of the car alarm. Jounouchi rubbed the grit from his eyes and fumbled for an ibuprofen, then fumbled for a glass of water, then knocked the glass of water onto the floor. He swore, dry-swallowed the ibuprofen, and stood up. The water soaked into the carpet and dripped _thuck-thuck_ from the nightstand.

Twenty minutes to wash and dress, forty minutes to make it to Takeda's. The route unfolded itself in Jounouchi's mind and he felt his stomach shift in nauseous protest.

 _Fridays._

He pushed away the nausea, then did ten star jumps, then fifty push-ups. He checked his phone again. No messages.

With the jeans he slept in, he dressed in his one good dark blue button up and a charcoal blazer he had inherited from Honda, long ago. Once it smelled of petrol, grease, leather, and the other industrial smells of biking. Now it was stitched with smoke and other men's booze. No point returning it now.

Jounouchi stuck his head outside his room.

'Yo, Sugata-kun?'

There was no answer, for which he was thankful. His flatmate could be out or unconscious and either suited Jounouchi just fine. The less he saw of the asshole, the better.

He padded to the kitchen and added hot water with bits of limescale to instant coffee, then sat at a tiny pine wood table, pocked with cigarette burns. From here he had the dim view of the apartment blocks opposite, each a concrete spine, with little balconies and windows and air conditioners. Dozens of tiny people moved in their tiny boxes, all of them like this own. He stirred his coffee with a finger and watched a woman opposite unclip laundry from the tiny line strung across her balcony. He could almost make out her expression, but not quite.

For the third time, he took out his phone. The cracked screen bit at his fingers as he checked his accounts. Nothing new from Anzu, who was rarely online with all her training and performances. Nothing from Honda, whose online presence was entirely restricted to being tagged in his girlfriend's photos. They were always neatly labelled: so-and-so restaurant, whatever street, Osaka, hundreds of miles away from Domino.

Shizuka had posted a slew of new shots. She sat beaming among her work friends, all of them in matching blazers, making Vs at the camera. He hadn't spoken to her since the funeral. She felt further away from him even than when he had chased after her and their mom in that car, when his chest hurt so much he thought it would fall out of him, and the sunlight burned his skin and his eyes and turned his neck hot and rosy…

He kept scrolling. Yuugi had posted a new photo. He was at dinner with someone Jounouchi didn't recognise, a white guy with piercings and blue-rimmed glasses. The two of them smiled broadly at the camera. Jounouchi stared at the other guy, trying to place him, coming up blank. He scrolled down.

 _106 likes, 18 comments_.

'Shit,' he muttered, then read through some of the messages.

 _Omg you guys are so cute!_ wrote a stranger. _3 Yuugi and Leo my fave duellists_ wrote another. _wtf did u play DMG into a filled board w 2 f/ds_ wrote a third. All the usernames were ciphers to Jounouchi, a string of faceless someones. But Yuugi had replied to each and every comment, thanking people, exchanging greetings, suggesting meet ups. It must be exhausting, Jounouchi thought, to have so many people clamouring for your attention, and it was a mark of Yuugi's infinite kindness and empathy that he had a good word to say to every single one.

Jounouchi's fingers paused over the keys. _Looking great Yuugi_ he typed, then deleted it. _Saying hi from Domino_. He deleted this too. _Return my fucking messages fuck you_. He deleted that one more quickly. And it was bullshit and petty of him, because Yuugi _did_ return his messages. He was always friendly and caring and happy to hear from one of his oldest friends. But Yuugi befriended everyone he met, if they let him, and sometimes even if they didn't. It had been nearly a year since he last saw Jounouchi. It wasn't that he didn't care, of course he cared. But he cared about so many people now, and all of them strangers to Jounouchi.

He went to his own profile. He hadn't posted anything in a few days, the last picture being one of him outside some pointless attraction in a corner of Domino he had never before attended. He posed with the mascot, this ugly bronze bear, and pulled a face at the camera. No one had commented yet.

His phone vibrated suddenly in his hands and his heart leapt – _Yuugi!_

No. His alarm. _get to work asshole_ it read, a message from his conscientious past self. He flipped off the phone, silenced the alarm, then stood up.

Perhaps today would be different. Maybe something good would happen. Oh, God, maybe today would be different.

* * *

The metro purred and turned itself through Domino's insides. Commuters packed against him, eyes on the floor or their phones or magazines. Salarymen and women in suits and skirts and blazers were a familiar type to Jounouchi, but he had learned in recent months how to read their clothes in a new way. The times he'd worked nanbawan had taught him what good suits – fine tailoring, cashmere wools – ought to look like, and these middle-aged men with their ill-fitting sackcloth costumes no longer made him feel inferior as they once had. He might look like shit in comparison, but he could read them; he knew their type. He knew to what they aspired, and he would come closer to it than they ever would.

Jounouchi rubbed his eyes. _Fridays_. A pretty woman was absorbed in some fruit matching game on her phone and Jounouchi watched her out of his peripheries. How long had it been since he'd felt naked breasts against himself, smelt hair and sweet perfume, had someone sighing beneath him? Five months, perhaps. He rubbed his eyes again. He thought of Mai, then deliberately didn't think of Mai. The train rattled around him. _Three days to go_.

He disembarked outside the industrial district. The streets were gloomier here, with fewer streetlights. Darkness was cheap. Impassive warehouses regarded him, big and rusty, like things not quite dead.

Someone folded against the wall stared after him.

'Can you spare any change?'

He couldn't, of course, the rent was due next week and his account was almost dry. His stomach felt like sand. He could only hope there would be free food at whatever hole he would be sent to tonight.

He rifled in a pocket. 'Sorry, man, I don't have much.' He gave the guy the pitiful change he would have spent on gum, then stuck his hands back in his pockets.

 _Ah-a, what do we have here!_

In his other pocket – yes! – one remaining piece of gum. He removed it, examined it, then replaced it. Later. When he had to get to wherever he was going. He'd need it more then.

Much of the warehouses looked the same, but the one he wanted seemed especially uninviting. Understandable, the place was all but abandoned. Jounouchi presumed Takeda didn't own the building, but what did he know? What did he really know about his boss? The guy could be a millionaire or he could be a million in debt, and it would look the same. It was all the same. Wealth wasn't real to these people, he'd learned. Wealth wasn't a handful of coins and bills in your pocket, it was numbers on a screen. The numbers didn't _mean_ anything, not really. It was all some fantastic myth, illusory, sleights of hand and whispers.

He found the warehouse door: tall, dark, impassable. A single pale yellow bulb outside flickered on, off, off, off, on again, then another dark stretch. It always flickered like that. Jounouchi glared at it. He looked around and confirmed to himself that no one was in sighting range. Then he jumped several times in place and shook out his limbs, rolled his head, and spread a wide smile across his features. _Game on._

He knocked thrice, paused, thrice again, pause, then thrice again. The peep hole plate slid back with an unoiled complaint. The grey eyes within took him in, then unbolted the door.

'What's up?' he said to the doorman, but got no reply, as he never did. 'You are looking great today. Did you do something with your hair?' He might as well have been talking to a block of concrete.

'Jou-nou-chi!' Takeda's voice reached out across the warehouse: rough, inebriated, not unlike his father's. The memory made his stomach twitch. He turned to his boss. 'Come join us, my angel! My fucking star!' Takeda gestured welcome. He sat on a camping chair, and five more were positioned around him. Three were occupied, two by what Jounouchi loosely called his co-workers and one by a man Jounouchi didn't recognise. The oldest of the three men threw a disdainful glance at Jounouchi, the second ignored him. The newcomer stared at the floor and tapped his shoe on the concrete. The sole was peeling off what might have once been an expensive pair of shoes, and he took frenetic sucking breaths on a lopsided cigarette.

'Good to see you, Takeda-sama.' Jounouchi decked himself in a grin, extended his hand, and let Takeda shake it thoroughly. He smelled of synthetic strawberries and tobacco. 'May I say you are looking in fantastic health?'

'You may, you may!' Takeda laughed like a barking fox. 'Jounouchi, meet the new guy, Grasshopper. Grasshopper, say, "Hello, Jounouchi-san!"'

Grasshopper, his eyes like two moulding eggs, rolled around the room several times before stopping on Jounouchi. 'Hello, Jounouchi-san!' he said at a volume louder than was appropriate.

'You hope to be like Jounouchi one day, Grasshopper. You do what he does and you'll do well.' He clapped Grasshopper on the back and Grasshopper sagged to the floor. His eyes were tracking the star cracks in the concrete.

'Takeda-san.' The oldest spoke, voice full of resentment. 'Can we have our fucking assignments?'

'You are all so impatient, you will wear me to the ground!' He stuck his hand in his pocket and a tight metallic tension drew all their eyesight to his hand as he rifled. No one breathed; even Grasshopper had stopped sucking on his burned-out cigarette. Takeda withdrew his hand – and held a lighter. Everyone breathed out in annoyance. Takeda flipped them off, as if he hadn't been intentionally pushing their buttons. 'You're like fucking vultures, I swear to god. Like hyenas! Scavengers! I'm surrounded by carrion.'

'Takeda-san, we're all just eager to get started,' said Jounouchi. It hurt his teeth to stay so jovial and lie so well. 'I don't know about the rest of these guys, but I spend my whole trip over here anxious about where I'm gonna get sent to. It's always a bit like Christmas, y'know? You're like Santa!'

Takeda didn't laugh at this one, but he did stop stalling. He extracted from one pocket, first, a delicate pair of ancient spectacles that he balanced on his rocky nose, and then a slip of worn, crumpled paper. He cleared his throat, frowned at the paper, moved it closer to his eyes, further away, then closer again. Satisfied, he cleared his throat again, and delivered their assignments.

'Kenji, you're on the docks,' he said to the oldest. 'Don't fucking give me lip, you're on the docks. Wipe that look off your face. You're a classless thug and you get to sell to classless thugs. Masuda, you're on a cruise until Tuesday. Old fucks. Try not to get anyone killed; nothing kills a cruise like a dead body, let me fucking tell you. Grasshopper, baby boy: you get an easy one. Office up on Nishi Street. You'll be shadowing Tatsuma who works there. Easy job, you just sit there and sell to the nice fellows who have appointments. Easy-peasy-pudding-and-pie.'

Jounouchi's heart was retreating further into his boots. The office was what he always held out hope for. Tatsuma might be an asshole who should've retired or died a few decades back, but handing out pre-determined packets to people who paid in neat envelopes full of cash was so much easier than working a crowd and pushing. And if the office and the docks were taken, that meant…

Takeda turned to Jounouchi and pressed his palms together, as if in prayer. 'And you, Jounouchi-kun, my Gabriel, I have a very special job for you.' His eyes widened, then widened more, and for a moment Jounouchi thought they might pop out of his sockets and _plop_ wetly onto the floor. 'You're on nanbawan.'

Watery excitement and oily nausea swirled around his stomach. With effort, he increased the width of his grin by an extra tooth. 'Oh, Takeda-san, you didn't!'

The man laughed, this time like steam through a rusty pipe. 'I did, I did! All for you, for the weekend. Three days. See how you do. No pressure!'

Nanbawan was the slang denotation for a kind of geographical miasma. It referred to the clubs, parties, manors, top offices, penthouse apartments, five star restaurants, and occasional sex clubs occupied by the wealthiest elite in Takeda's contacts. It meant ¥7,000 a glass sake and ¥100,000 an hour escorts. High class, high pay, high anxiety. Women that all looked like models and men that pissed themselves in public. Endless hours of that shit, for three days – if he was lucky. If he was too friendly, not friendly enough, or some asshole took a dislike to him, then he'd be out in his ass and Takeda would probably fire him. And if it was a yakuza joint he might lose a finger, or worse.

Takeda extracted a card from the pocket of his blue suit jacket. The fabric shimmered cheaply in the light. 'This party – very exclusive. Only the best. Millionaires, all of them. And I'm sending you, Jounouchi. You! Do you know why?'

Jounouchi leaned forward conspiratorially. 'Because otherwise you'd have to send these clowns,' he whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear. It was a bad joke, but Takeda laughed like Jounouchi had breathed nitrous oxide down his throat.

'You're my guy, Jounouchi. You are my top gun.'

'Am I fucking hearing this right?' said Kenji. 'He's twenty-six. You're sending a fucking infant to run a nanbawan gig? Are you high?'

Takeda was usually high, as was Kenji, so this insult didn't carry much sting.

'He's worked them before, you know. That time you were off sick, Kenji-chan, that time you wasted _my_ supply having your own little private party and you missed two days of work.'

'I paid you back,' Kenji snapped.

Takeda waved his fingers. 'But you lost my respect. My trust. That costs more than money can buy, my friend. And that's why I've put Jounouchi on this gig.' He pulled out from beneath his chair a big gym bag and unzipped it. Jounouchi tried not to think about how much money the pile of neatly wrapped white bags suggested. Takeda extracted one and tossed it in Jounouchi's direction. Takeda grinned and his eyes were like tar pits. 'You make me proud, kiddo.'

* * *

Jounouchi rode the metro back across town and thought about the new guy, about Kenji, about Takeda. The boss recalled his father. The coarseness of his laugh, how he held his cigarettes between thumb and forefinger, something about his easy joviality that overlaid the constant threat of violence. Maybe that was why Jounouchi took the job. Maybe it was the money, the ¥50,000 he could clear in a night, or so it was claimed. That's what Takeda had hooked him with, though most days it was more like 10,000, if he was lucky. _Better luck next time, kiddo,_ Takeda would say. _Beginners have it hardest! Just think, tonight could be the night you pull half a mil!_

And that had kept Jounouchi coming back. If he planned his meals right, he could crib off the catering at these parties and not have to pay for food three days of the week, plus there was the free booze, and every night was the possibility he might make enough to take care of his rent for the next three months. If he could get landed with more nanbawan gigs, then he'd be pulling 50k on the reg. He could pay off his back rent on his shitty apartment and finally have the spare cash to…

 _To what?_

There was nothing on which he needed to spend his money.

Shizuka didn't need it, she raked in four million yen a year. His mother was fine supporting herself. His dad was dead.

He could fly out to Osaka. _Hey-o Honda! It's me! And Ayaka-chan, you look gorgeous! Let me see the baby! How long am I here for? Oh, not long! I'll take the couch! Oh – no, of course, no problem; the floor is fine! Well, I'll book the hotel down the street, then. No problemo, I've got the cash. You wanna do lunch tomorrow? Well, dinner then? How about the day after?_

Jounouchi put the thought from his mind. And Yuugi? If he wanted to see Yuugi he'd have to book a month in advance, Yuugi's schedule was so packed.

He twisted his face. No, he wouldn't need to book in advance. Yuugi would clear a space for him somewhere, and he'd cancel something else, and Jounouchi would feel like a burden, and the whole thing would make him feel worse.

Better to keep working. Keep making money. Something would turn up. Maybe he could ask out that barista who worked in the coffee shop on his street, she always seemed to have an extra smile for him.

Jounouchi rubbed his eyes. The now empty metro carriage swayed around him as they threaded through the earth. He stared out of the black windows and wondered what it would feel like to throw yourself into that darkness – would it be a quick death, crushed under the tracks?

He shivered and stuffed his hands back in his pockets.

 _Gum!_

He'd forgotten. Jounouchi unwrapped the white pellet and shoved it into his mouth. Maybe tonight would be different.

* * *

He found the party on floor thirty-three of an apartment block overlooking the park. The doorman, who was hunched over his desk like he'd died there a hundred years ago and had never left, didn't question Jounouchi when he said he was there for the party. In the long crawl through the elevator, he stared into the darkened mirror. His reflection stared back, and the two of them both sort of felt like they didn't recognise one another.

The doors hummed open and he entered a corridor with a single door. A rumble of voices and cool, strange jazz swirled beyond it. He did a few jumps and cracked his neck a couple of times. _Smile! You're happy, you're fun, you're great to be around. You're gonna make a killing tonight. Everyone wants what you've come to give 'em. You're Takeda's star._

From some deep recess of his brain, a voice murmured, _the wolf star, the dog star_.

He shook it off. He knocked and waited, and the door was opened by a woman in a long black dress. There was a stunning beauty about her, like she lived on the television and had just stepped out to open the door.

'Hey there! I'm Jounouchi. I believe you contacted my employer Takeda-sama for some special catering.' He smiled his most winsome, shining smile.

The woman stared at him, her eyes dead and fishlike. 'Takeda?'

'Ah, yeah? Takeda-sama, he…' Jounouchi wondered horribly if he'd got the wrong address. 'You didn't… I…'

As he floundered, a second woman came to the door. She was also impossibly beautiful, unreal, like a saint.

'It's the coke guy,' she said, and the first woman shrugged and stood aside.

'Thank you very much! Now, I'm sure Takeda has explained to you how this works. It's cash up front and…'

The second woman pulled a pile of bills out of the front of her dress and held them out. Jounouchi took them. They were warm from her flesh.

'Righty-o!' He tried to count them while talking. _Be friendly. Be entertaining. Dance like Otogi's fucking dog_. 'This is awesome. Would you like me to distribute some—'

The first woman snapped her fingers in his face. 'Four grams for us, then do the rounds.'

Jounouchi felt his smile start to slip, but he stapled it back up.

'Sure thing.' From the bag in his pocket, he handed out four sachets. 'You ladies have a good night!'

But they had already turned away, reabsorbing themselves into the mire of people beyond. The room was all dimmed lamps and dark corners, groups of the beautiful and the rich, supernatural women and men who made more in an hour than Jounouchi would make in a lifetime. Some were clustered in small groups, conspiratorial and sexual, men whispering things into women's ears with hands on their thighs. Elsewhere people joked and shouted, red-faced and riotous with alcohol, and all of them living entirely in moment after moment of boundless wealth.

Jounouchi knew no one and no one knew him. He was pressed against the glass of these people's lives, so close to the warmth and vivacity of it all, but he would never break in, not really. He could tell jokes and people would laugh, and some guy would clap him on the back and tell him, 'You're alright, Jogo! You're alright!' And then he would go home, and he would check his messages, and he would go to sleep as the sun crept up again. His chest heaved. Jounouchi ignored it. He scanned the party. _Time to go to work_.

* * *

The men here talked endless waterfalls of shit. They brayed at one another's jokes, they dumped cigarette ash on carpets, they made cracks about rape, they laughed about how homeless people should be poisoned. They talked about money like it was a god.

'Let me tell you about capitalism,' one would say. 'Let me tell you how the world works. The world is built from money and it's built to make money, and if you're not scooping it up then you might as well be the fucking janitor. I make two thousand USD an hour and I wipe my ass with fucking vicuña if I want to. I fuck a new woman every day and I got a wife who thinks I'm the best husband God could have given her.' They all talked like this, and once Jounouchi had got half a gram inside them they talked like that even more.

It was some kind of hell, surely, to be stuck with such people and have to sell them a product to make them even worse.

After he'd made the necessary rounds and worked his way around the party, he rewarded himself with a break and wandered out to the balcony. It was black and glacial this far up, the middle of a November night, and he shivered as he listened to the traffic whispering below. It was easier to breathe, quieter, than the crush of the party. He looked to the ground below, yawning up at him, and reasoned it would be a quicker death than throwing yourself off a metro platform.

 _Shut up, Jounouchi, you fucking weak failure. Just do your job. Go back inside and do your job._

The thought of re-entering that kiln of insincere smiles and casual assaults only made the balcony ledge more attractive. He took a slow breath. Maybe he could do one bump. Takeda wouldn't notice, Takeda didn't care. For a nanbawan gig, who gave a shit if a quarter gram was missing?

He looked around him. The handful of people out here were paying him no attention, all of them absorbed in private acts or conversation. There was a couple talking in low voices, having some kind of drunk flirtation, and a woman sitting with a phone pressed to her ear, her expression one of crisis, and closest to him was a tall, slender – _Seto Kaiba_.

Jounouchi felt the world stop, readjust itself, then continue turning.

Kaiba leaned against a wall, legs crossed, absorbed in his phone. The sheer casualness of it was offensive. He looked as real and normal as any other guest, like he was supposed to be there, but the nonsense of his presence made Jounouchi blink several times. He glanced around to see if anyone else was reacting to Seto Kaiba's presence with the disbelief and indignation that Jounouchi was feeling, but he was alone. Of course, this was a party of billionaires; what did one more billionaire matter?

Jounouchi watched him, unobserved. Whatever drew Kaiba's attention on his phone screen, it was far too enrapturing for him to break his attention. His hair was a little shorter and he was not quite so skinny has he had once been, his limbs more mature and substantial than the lank he had once carried. He wore a navy turtleneck with more heft to it than the sleek black to which Jounouchi had become accustomed to seeing him wear, and no coat, which made him look smaller, more like a normal human being.

Eight years. Eight years since they had last spoken, and there he was. The oneiric strangeness of Seto Kaiba, standing there like any other human being, was uncanny and stunning in a way that Jounouchi could not quite process.

Kaiba had not noticed Jounouchi. His thumbs moved with rapid grace and the white light lit his face in an oddly medical way. Jounouchi tried and failed to think of some form of greeting that fit the absurdity of the situation, and came up blank.

'Yo,' he said, for lack of anything else to offer, and got no response. Kaiba did not even seem to have heard him. 'You, uh, come here often?' he joked badly, but this too got no response. Kaiba might as well have been on Neptune. Jounouchi thought about tapping his arm, then reconsidered. This seemed some kind of admission of defeat. He touched the bag in his pocket. Over half way empty, and it was only Friday. He had some time to kill. And this was an impossible situation, so he pried into it with the one tool with which he had been supplied.

'Hey there, how are you doing? Having a good night? Just wanted to see if I could interest you in some cocaine. Compliments of the host.' The patter came to him naturally; he had recited it a hundred times. '100% pure, Sawamura's guarantee. This is imported from America and the finest money can buy. If you're a newcomer to—'

'One gram.'

The suddenness and unexpectedness of the answer made Jounouchi drop the salesman persona like he was holding roadkill.

'What?'

'I'll take one gram.'

And still, Kaiba did not look up from his phone.

Jounouchi closed his open mouth. 'I wasn't expecting you to say yes, Kaiba. Jesus, the fuck is wrong with you?'

And with that, finally, Kaiba looked up. His face ran through emotions like projector slides: irritation, confusion, recognition, confusion again, then a careful stoicism. The recognition flowed between them. He was older and his face thinner, having lost the gentle haze of adolescence that had once softened all their features. But he was the same Seto Kaiba that Jounouchi had known since high school, and when he spoke his voice was the same, albeit with an almost imperceptible layer of grit over it that had come with age.

'What are you doing here?'

There was an easy disdain to his voice, and Jounouchi imagined Kaiba would have addressed him in exactly the same way if he had shown up in Kaiba's bedroom on the KaibaCorp blimp in Battle City. Familiarity and nostalgia flooded him with a kind of heat he hadn't felt in months.

'What, no hello?' He grinned, and for the first time that evening there was genuine warmth to it. 'No "how are you?" Good to see you never grew into any manners, Kaiba.'

Kaiba continued to stare. It was as though Jounouchi seemed as unreal to him as he did to Jounouchi, like they were both waiting to wake up from some strange childhood dream. There was a deep unreality to looking at one another like this, in the same delicate light, hearing the same strange shifting jazz, standing with the same glittering city laid out beneath them.

'Are you…' Kaiba's gaze tried and failed to comprehend Jounouchi's existence and its context. 'Wait staff?'

'Nah, not exactly. Well, sort of, I guess. I'm catering. I cater.' He smiled, at first with warm sincerity, but then increasing fixedness as Kaiba regarded him like he were some kind of weird gross insect. 'Come on! No hello, really? Okay, I'll start. Hello, Kaiba. How have you been?'

Kaiba stared, his phone forgotten, and looked Jounouchi over as if he might find some clue to the absurdity of the situation lodged in Jounouchi's clothes. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He slid his phone into his pocket and looked around them, perhaps hoping to find someone who could explain to him why Jounouchi Katsuya was standing in front of him, but they were alone.

And then a new expression locked onto Kaiba's face, one Jounouchi had seen countless times.

'Did Yuugi send you?' he asked, and he was breathing out excitement – hot, low, rapturous. Jounouchi stared back.

'Well, no, of course not.'

'He didn't send you because he's too scared to meet me himself, hm?' Kaiba continued, absorbed by his lunatic interpretation of events. 'Let me guess. He's decided to stop wasting his time in kiddie league tournaments and finally get up the nerve to have a real duel. And yet he sends you to beg on his behalf.'

Jounouchi continued to stare. The words were nonsense. And then he understood. And it was all so terribly sad. Because Yuugi wasn't here, and he wasn't here because he didn't want to be, and Jounouchi missed him so much it hurt and Yuugi was still the first thing on Kaiba's mind after all this time. It didn't work anymore. High school was over and they were closer to thirty than not, and Yuugi was gone, and Honda was gone, and so were Anzu and Shizuka and the rest of them, and Jounouchi and Kaiba had been left behind. They had both been forgotten, and Jounouchi knew that with an abyssal ache that no amount of time passed had managed to fill.

And Kaiba didn't know. Kaiba was the same. The world was impossibly different but Kaiba hadn't changed. He was still that tech billionaire with no friends, hoping for a duel or a fight because that was the only way he knew how to interact with the world.

'Yuugi's in America. I haven't spoken to him in… well, it's been a few weeks. I'm just…' He swallowed. 'It's a coincidence that we're both here. I'm just… working the party.'

The puzzle finally started to align for Kaiba. The light in his eyes had completely gone. His expression ran through another few cycles and settled on disdain.

'You're selling drugs?'

And that made it real in a way it never had been. Everything suddenly, horribly, set into disgusting place. Here he was, and here was Kaiba, and this is what they were.

'Yeah. Cocaine specifically. I just do cocaine.' He felt his own self-disgust refract off Kaiba and back into himself. 'I've worked other jobs,' he continued, his tone awkwardly light. 'But this pays the best. Two to three days a week is all I have to work to pay for… you know, rent and food and that.'

Kaiba did something with his jaw and lips, as though relocking them into place.

'That's pathetic. Once I respected you as a duellist. And this is what you've become?'

 _Of course. Of course this is how it would be._

'Ah, come on, asshole,' he said brightly, but the words were tinny. 'Come on, you overprivileged, stuck-up piece of shit. We're not all billionaires. Some of us work for a living. You think competitive duelling pays my bills?'

But there was nothing he could say, no insult that would recontextualise what he was.

'Certainly not _losing_ at competitive duelling,' said Kaiba in retort. 'You haven't been ranked since, what, the Chinese internationals? And you placed fifth, I believe.'

The shame of that memory bristled him, but the oddness that Kaiba had kept track of his rankings softened the bite. He had had nothing better to do. And then something occurred to Jounouchi, obviously, and he felt a weird bitter elation. The context shifted.

'Wait.' He frowned with mock concentration. 'Here I am listening to you talk down to me. But you were about to buy from me. One gram, you said. You're going to look down on me for dealing when you're a…' He let the sentence hang and droop in the air as he selected the best term like a fine wine. 'You're a _customer_.'

Kaiba was not to be deterred. 'I have no ethical qualms with cocaine, obviously. It's a stimulant like any other. More effective than caffeine and useful if taken responsibly.'

There was something hugely funny about the situation, farcical and stupid, and Jounouchi wanted to laugh and also cry for reasons he could not quite place. It felt like they were on even footing, albeit on the side of some impossible mountain that could kill them both at any second.

'So,' he said firmly, shifting down a few gears. 'How's Mokuba?'

The abrupt turn clearly displeased Kaiba, who still refused to return the ball.

'He's fine.' His mouth twitched into something that definitely wasn't a smile, but couldn't have been any other expression either. 'How's your family? Still living with your deadbeat father?'

The line hurt, but it was a sting dipped in nostalgia. No one had said a bad word about his dad since the man's heart attack. The second he hit the bathroom floor, the world's opinion of Jounouchi Sr did a smooth 180 and he was suddenly the gentlest soul on earth, beloved by all; _'a man who had his demons but a good heart_ ', the eulogy had said, which was ironic given how objectively bad the man's heart had turned out to be in the end. It was surreal to hear someone speak of the man with the disdain he earned in life.

'Ah… He passed away. Four months ago.' Jounouchi said this flatly, as though supplying information about the weather.

Perhaps sixteen-year-old Kaiba would have snarled some crack about how it was good the trash had been taken out, but this Seto Kaiba was pushing thirty and had apparently managed to scrape together just enough empathy and self-awareness to express at least polite regret at the _faux pas_. 'My apologies,' he said curtly.

Jounouchi shrugged. 'It's fine.'

And it was weird suddenly, because Jounouchi had no one to talk to when his dad died who understood what it was like to lose someone close to you that you didn't love. But Kaiba got it. Kaiba knew what it was like to lose a parent you kind of couldn't fucking stand, a parent you had wished dead a thousand times, and now that it was real you still couldn't feel entirely guilty about wishing him dead. It became easier to keep talking.

'Honestly, it's refreshing to hear someone say something disrespectful about the asshole. People act like you're such a fucking saint the second your heart stops beating, you know?'

Kaiba said nothing to this, but Jounouchi knew he understood. And Kaiba didn't say anything because he knew Jounouchi knew he understood, and Jounouchi had just built a little bridge of intimacy between them that Kaiba couldn't cut down.

Whatever Kaiba might have said in response, however, Jounouchi didn't hear, because at that moment the apartment door opened and a man called Micky Tanner walked in, who was the client Kaiba had come to meet, and the entire energy of the party tightened as around a distaff.

An awful off-key English song echoed into the lounge and it seemed everyone stopped what they were doing, some from curiosity, some respect, others disgust.

' _O when the saints! O when the saints! O when the saints go march-ing in!'_

The singer strode into the room, into its centre, and addressed his song to the women he passed. Many bared their teeth in joy or threat. The man was short, long-faced and sallow, and he wore a pastel lilac suit asynchronous with any current style. One hand held a fat cigar, dragging smoke through the air, its fingers crowded with heavy golden rings. His tiny black eyes roved through the crowd, then shone through to the balcony. He opened his arms wide, as if in greeting, and approached them.

' _I'd like to be within that number!'_

He sidled to a slow stop in front of Kaiba, whose jaw was tight and forehead was pulsing. Micky Tanner sang the last loud, drunken lyric into Kaiba's deliberately impassive face.

' _O when the saints go marching iiiin!'_

He dragged out the final syllable so long that Jounouchi thought the vessel in Kaiba's forehead might erupt from the skin. ' _Hey there_ , Seto Kaiba,' the man said in American English. He shook Kaiba's hand with two of his own.

'Tanner,' said Kaiba, then something else in English that Jounouchi could not quite follow.

'Seto Kaiba. _You look fantastic_.' Tanner's voice flowed like grit down a landslide. Jounouchi managed to catch snatches here and there, the phrases ' _fucking magazine model_ ' and then, unmistakeably, ' _Jap Johnny Depp_.'

Kaiba's mouth jerked in a motion that sort of suggested some possibility of a smile. Tanner clapped his hand on Kaiba's arm and said something else that entirely eluded Jounouchi, but he could judge from Kaiba's expression that the comment wasn't welcome. Suddenly Jounouchi no longer felt the outsider in a room of ultra-rich assholes, but somehow more in his element than Kaiba, whose stiffness and discomfort reverberated around the room like the note of a single siren. Jounouchi looked between Kaiba and the American, who was continuing to spout endless trash (Jounouchi, distracted, only caught the profanity and slurs). Jounouchi made some quick assessments. He smelled business, and he spied a way to both outshine Kaiba in a professional environment as well as do him a social courtesy.

 _Three birds, one rock._

Jounouchi insinuated himself into the conversation with practised technique: a light hand on the American's shoulder, his most warm and welcoming grin. ' _Cocaine_?' he said in English, and twitched his finger to his nose. ' _On the house_ ,' he added, one fragment of his patter for selling to westerners. Tanner laughed and bared a mouth of nicotine-black teeth. He inclined his head in Jounouchi's direction and placed one hand on his own chest and the other on Kaiba's, apparently to express some kind of camaraderie, though Kaiba looked about ready to throw the man from the balcony.

' _I think we'd both appreciate that_ ,' said Tanner in slow exaggerated English, and Jounouchi grinned again.

' _Super fantastic_ ,' said Jounouchi with his most effervescent, glimmering smile.

And that's how Jounouchi found himself sitting with Seto Kaiba and an American billionaire, watching the man clear impressive lines of coke.

* * *

They sat around a glass coffee table in the midst of the party, along with two of the dark-eyed, ethereal women who remained almost entirely silent for the entire evening. One kept one arm in contact with Tanner at all times, around his shoulders or waist or on his knee; the second briefly attempted to establish the same physical intimacy with Kaiba, but he jerked away from her touch as if she had burned him. Kaiba also refused Tanner's many invitations to partake of the coke, which raised certain questions for Jounouchi, but on which he did not comment. For his own part, Jounouchi negotiated lines of inositol onto the table and did those instead.

Tanner talked in rapid English that was mostly incomprehensible to Jounouchi, although he caught occasional phrases about pop culture, sex, and the quality of the party. Tanner seemed delighted by Jounouchi's attempts to join in the conversation, reacting as though he were watching a dog try to speak. But Jounouchi was used to that.

' _This is great coke for Asian shit!_ ' Tanner informed him charitably.

 _Fucking Americans_ , Jounouchi thought. ' _Thank you, pal!_ ' he said aloud.

But as much as his own loathing crystallised, Kaiba's was sharp enough to cut yourself. When he spoke, which was rare, it was always an attempt to change the subject to business: a comment about the project he was working on, about the status of the American stock market, and about some funding he apparently wanted which Jounouchi gathered the American was supposed to supply.

It surprised Jounouchi to realise, eight years on from high school, his English had improved to the degree that he could pick out the flaws in Kaiba's accent. Not that Kaiba's English was bad, of course, and it was better than Jounouchi's – higher class, too, with that clipped RP tone that was so prized – but he could feel out the inconsistencies in his vowels in a way he never could at school. In high school, he accepted without question that Kaiba's English – when reading those trash poems by dead white guys aloud in class – was not only flawless but the platonic ideal of the language, and now he found himself almost unsettled to have the ability to shatter that illusion.

Kaiba's body language, on the other hand, was terrible. If the guy was trying to schmooze with the vulgar American he could not be doing a better job of advertising his discomfort. He sat on the very edge of his seat, his legs crossed sharply, and managed only the thinnest of feigned smiles at the man's appalling jokes. Not that the American seemed to mind; he was clearly accustomed to entertaining himself. At one point he made a particularly racist comment, one that made Jounouchi – who heard all kinds of bullshit in his line of work – raise his eyebrows involuntarily, but Kaiba said nothing.

By four AM, the conversation seemed to be drawing to a close. Jounouchi's bag was emptied out, and it was only Friday. That was the best piece of luck he'd had in weeks. He could report in with Takeda and take the next two days off.

He left the apartment with Kaiba and the American, in theory the third wheel, yet feeling strangely included in the American's crass effulgence in a way that Kaiba clearly was not. Outside the apartment building, pausing under the awning to stay out of the rain, Kaiba and the American shook hands; or rather, the American grabbed Kaiba's hand in both of his and gave it a violent thrashing.

' _We must do this again, Kaiba. Great party._ ' Then gibberish. ' _I fucking love Japan. The women here are_ …' He made a hand gesture with his closed fist that Kaiba didn't seem to understand. ' _It's like fucking a_ …' and then something Jounouchi did not understand, but which he knew enough to laugh at.

Kaiba, every note of his voice steeped in tension, asked something which Jounouchi expected was business-related.

The American waved his hand as though not even slightly involved in the business proposition Kaiba was entirely consumed with settling. ' _Yeah, no problem_.' The American blabbered some more, then exclaimed loudly: ' _And this guy!_ ' He clapped a hand on Jounouchi's back, who grinned back. ' _Take my card. Take it_.' And he slipped a small white business card into Jounouchi's breast pocket. ' _Call me if I'm town. Hook me up, kiddo. I'll let you borrow one of my…_ ' He finished with some piece of American slang that was probably equally lost on Kaiba.

And with that, he disappeared into a small limousine that was filled with more people, more noise, and would doubtless carry the party elsewhere, into the morning.

Jounouchi and Kaiba were left alone. Kaiba watched the car disappear, staring after it long after it left their sight, consumed by some mix of disorientation and private anxiety. He had looked so much the same when they met, but there was something different there, something more worn. Jounouchi then realised, having not thought about it for all the long years he hadn't seen Kaiba, that he had never, not once, seen him duel since Egypt.

Jounouchi spoke quietly, through the rain. 'You get your business done, then?'

Kaiba's expression smoothed itself. He replied in English, then corrected himself. 'I did what was needed. With any luck, the rest of our interactions can be accomplished through paperwork.'

'He seemed like a real jackass.'

Kaiba muttered something else in English, perhaps assuming Jounouchi would not understand, but Jounouchi caught the profanity. 'Regardless. It's done with now.'

They stood together, the two of them in the streetlight. The rain crashed down like metal. A second car pulled up: Kaiba's, a Bentley.

'Nice fuckin' wheels,' he said, and Kaiba looked at the car as though he had never seen it before.

'Yes, I suppose,' he said, as though this was obvious, then opened the car door and moved to climb in.

'Is that it?' said Jounouchi, incredulous. 'Not even a goodbye?' Kaiba paused, liminal between the warmth of the car and the wet street with Jounouchi. 'I haven't seen you in eight years.'

'And we will continue not seeing one another for the next eight years, I imagine.'

The rain began to soak Jounouchi, though it was also starting to drip from Kaiba's face. Jounouchi thought, disconnectedly, of the sideways glass on his side stand and the patch of damp carpet beneath that he had not bothered to dry.

'Don't pull this crap on me, Kaiba. Don't pretend like running into me meant _nothing_ to you.'

'But it did. Mean nothing,' Kaiba added vaguely, as though his mind were elsewhere. Kaiba folded himself into the car and moved to close the door, but Jounouchi grabbed it. His fingers were icy against the rain-slick metal.

Kaiba held up his hand to someone in the car front seat that Jounouchi couldn't see. 'It's fine, Kaoru.'

'No, it's not fine!' The rain slimed Jounouchi's eyes and he couldn't clear his vision. Kaiba swam blurry and vague in front of him, lit by the car interior, his face blooming golden. 'I haven't seen you since high school. I haven't heard from you, you haven't spoken to me or Yuugi, you – I mean, fuck, the first thing you ask me is if Yuugi _sent_ me. Do you get how nuts that is? Don't pretend like you don't give a shit about seeing me again.'

Wherever Kaiba's thoughts were, they weren't on that wet street with Jounouchi. He no longer looked like the boy Jounouchi had known in high school; he looked like a man, and a stranger at that, no different really than any other nameless customer or one of Yuugi's faceless fans or whatever poor desperate fuck Takeda had employed to work off debts he would die with. Jounouchi didn't recognise this person any more.

'This meant nothing,' Kaiba repeated, and he shut the door. The car slid away from the kerb, kicking up a little water onto Jounouchi's already saturated trousers, and its lights shrank to dots before being absorbed in the haze of downtown. Jounouchi watched it go with the ache in his chest rising up through him again like bile.

'Well, fuck you, Kaiba!' he shouted after the car, but he wasn't shouting it at Kaiba, not really. It was for everything and everyone, and for the long route home and his empty bed and the whole past eight years.

He breathed slowly in the night. The rain soaked him like a drowned animal. He shivered, pulled his blazer tighter about him, and picked out the sign for the metro. It pulsed through the darkness like a cyan halo. Jounouchi pulled up his collar and set out through the rain. Tonight had been like any other.

* * *

 **Things to expect with this fic: slowburn, unromantic, manga characterisation, gen, angst, nostalgia, poverty, wealth, people trying to make do. This is labelled Jounouchi/Kaiba and will have nonplatonic elements between the two of them, but fair warning those elements will be far down the line.**

 **I've been out of the fandom for four years and I didn't think I'd return, but apparently I react to hopeless workloads by taking on more work, and a JouKai longfic seemed like a good idea. /finger guns/**


	2. Days Go By

Takeda counted the five hundred yen bills like he was making love. There was sensuality and practised grace to the rhythm of licking his finger, touching it to the paper, peeling it back, slipping it from the pack; and then, again, the lick, touch, peel, slip. His other hand rubbed the grainy shaft of a cigarillo. He liked to make you watch.

Jounouchi wondered if that was the only kind of sex Takeda had these days: watching, not doing. The skin of his neck drooped with age and decline, his hands shook sometimes, the caps of his knees pressed sharply through his slacks. If death had a face, it might be Takeda's. Jounouchi thought that, if death came for him in the night, it would breathe like Takeda into his ear and touch his bones like he touched that money.

'It's all there, pops. It always is, you know me.' Jounouchi winked and then he grinned until his gums ached. 'I've never held out on you.'

'No, Katsuya-chan, no you haven't. But everyone slips up eventually. Everyone betrays you. Trust doesn't pay the bills, angel cakes.'

Jounouchi gave a placid shrug and tried to lean back into the campfire chair. It burned his spine, but he relaxed anyway into the pretence of comfort. The warehouse chilled him.

'And besides,' Takeda continued, 'It's not like you or anyone else to cash in on a Saturday. No one has a Friday night that good.'

' _ _I__ have Friday nights that good. Guess I'm just lucky.' He pulled another grin onto his face. Takeda's empty eyes twinkled at him.

'And how was the party? Lots of cute hunnies?'

'Not exactly. Well, yeah, the women there all look like models, but they're not going to, you know, canoodle with the staff.' Jounouchi considered not telling Takeda what had transpired the previous evening. There seemed something private about his meeting with Kaiba on the balcony and the way Kaiba had driven off alone and the hatred Jounouchi had nursed sleeplessly to bed the previous night. He wished he had Yuugi or Honda or Anzu to talk to. But he didn't have Yuugi, or Honda, or Anzu. He had Takeda. And talking to Takeda was easy. Takeda listened to what you had to say, though his attentiveness didn't stem from compassion; that's just what vultures did. 'I actually ran into someone I knew. Kaiba Seto.'

Takeda rolled a laugh around his mouth then spat it out. 'That bastard.'

'It's been nearly ten years since I last saw him. No surprise that he's just as much as an asshole as he when we were kids. I thought he might have mellowed a bit since his teenage years, but he's still just as fucking intolerable.'

'How so, love?'

'He's a pompous asshole. Thinks he's better than everyone else. Always has done, and I guess he always will.' Jounouchi paused to unravel a sneer across his mouth. 'No wonder the piece of shit doesn't have any friends.'

'He looks down on you,' said Takeda sympathetically. 'Treats you like you work for him.'

'It's not even that, you know. It's not just the class thing. No, it's more like he personally hates me just for, like, deigning to be in the same room as him. Like I'm going to infect him or cough on him or something. He was like this all the time in high school.'

'Known him that long, huh?'

'Yeah, since we were fifteen. He was unbelievable when we first met. Real out-and-out psycho. But he grew out of that and I guess I'd hoped he would grow out of the rest of his issues. But he's the same old creep he's always been.'

Takeda peeled the bills more slowly, counting them with the beat of a silent clock. 'Funny that you never mentioned being chummy with someone as high and mighty as Kaiba-sana.'

Jounouchi vaguely sensed some kind of danger bristling up against him, like the glint of the bared teeth of a dog he couldn't see.

'Well, we're not "chummy". He can't stand me. I can't stand him. I only talked to him because I hadn't seen him in so long and I thought… I guess I thought things might be different.' He swallowed. 'Idiot that I am.'

'Were you polite to him?' Takeda's bill-counting had slowed to a standstill.

'Of course I was. You know me, Takeda-san, I'm a bundle of joy to be around.' He tried to grin again but the smile got caught on his lips. He dropped it. 'He's an asshole, okay? He's like this. Has literally zero friends.'

'Friends or not, you guys clearly got history. Years of knowing a guy like that, someone really elite, well… that's what we call a contact, Jounouchi. That's an open door. I did not think you were the type to hold out on me.' He tutted and waved a grimy finger. 'You've disappointed me.'

Jounouchi was too nonplussed to keep up his glitter-and-smiles façade. 'What did you want me to do? Get his number?'

Takeda's movements were slow, oily, sleek. 'Of course, Jounouchi. If he buys, you sell. That's a way into a whole new tier for us. Imagine our income if we counted Kaiba Seto among our contacts. Gotta say, I'm pretty fucking pissed off you kept information like that from me.'

'I'm… I'm not his __friend__ , Takeda, I barely know him. We – you know, we went to high school together. He went to high school with a lot of fuckin' people, you think he's close with any of them?'

Takeda was unmoved. 'So that's the extent of your relationship with him, huh? You never hung out outside of high school?' His eyes had brightened, and Jounouchi sensed the approach of those bared teeth. Takeda dragged out the silence, smoking deeply and exhaling rings. 'You're not holding out on me, eh, Katsuya?'

'We used to duel,' said Jounouchi, as matter-of-factly as he could. 'A couple of times. But you know I was a duellist, Takeda; I duelled literally hundreds of people. I don't remember most of their names.' A lie.

'The Battle City. I remember that tournament. Big deal for Domino, I remember the fucking traffic was abysmal for weeks. That cunt Kaiba, he should have been drowning in lawsuits. But I digress. You and him duelled at the, what, semi-finals?'

Jounouchi creaked his chair forwards, backwards. 'No. We didn't get matched. He duelled Mutou.'

'Oh yeah, oh yeah. I remember now. Kaiba wouldn't announce the fucking line up until the day of the duel, so all the bookies had to void the bets on match ups that didn't happen. Real pain in the ass. You vs Kaiba was one that got voided. Your odds were seven-to-one against.'

It shouldn't have hurt, but it did, even now, all these years later. Jounouchi kept his eyes fixed on the tumorous dirty pipes crowding the ceiling. 'Good memory you got there.'

'Yeah! Yeah, right? I remember it so clearly. You know why? It would have been, what… early evening, I guess. I was running this little betting shop on the east side and I had this chick working for me – fucking fantastic tits but terrible at her job – and I had to explain shit to her over and over. One day there was this mix up. Some guy came in to place a bet on the Battle City semi-finals, and my little cashier couldn't figure out what he wanted to do. Dumb as a ton of bricks. This guy, he wanted to place a bet on Kaiba to win against you. But the guy keeps saying "Jounouchi" and the cashier is like, "I thought you wanted to bet on Kaiba." And they have this little back and forth, neither having a clue what the other is saying, until I step in. "Sweetcheeks," I say, "The gentleman is __called__ Jounouchi and he wants to bet on Kaiba." And we all have a good laugh about it.'

Jounouchi creaked his chair and listened to Takeda's watch tick. One second, creak back; one second, creak forwards.

'I knew that guy. Not by name, but I'd seen him around the card houses. Serial gambler, drunk, waste of space.' He filled the air with smoke. 'Embarrassing, huh? Your own dad bets against you.'

'There's more than one drunk Jounouchi in Domino, I'm sure,' said Jounouchi, trying to sound bored.

'Not ones with baby angel faces like you got, Katsuya-chan.' Takeda reached out to slap his cheek with a parody of affection. 'I'd know your old man anywhere. But that's water under the bridge, piss under the turnpike. You're my best guy. Hell, you just cleared 100 grams in one evening. If I sent you out to do the same tonight – don't worry, I won't, I won't – we'd clear 100k by Sunday. But it's not all about money. Well, it's __mostly__ about money.' He spat out another cancerous laugh. 'But I want to raise our profile too, Katsuya-chan. And a contact like Kaiba – wow, we'd really be moving up in the world. Get me his number, Katsuya. Just that. I'm not asking much, just the phone number. Personal cellular number. Get me that. I can do a lot with that.'

'How the fuck am I supposed to get his number? He hates me, Takeda-san, I told you. He's not going to agree to lunch with me, he's not going to let me up to his office. What do you expect me to do, waltz into the lobby of his eighty floor skyscraper and demand an audience?'

Takeda waved his hand and batted away these trivial concerns. 'Oh, don't you worry about that. You're the most lovable guy I know; I trust you to win the wallet of Kaiba Seto. And you know why?'

'No.'

Takeda negotiated himself further in his seat until he was sat inches from Jounouchi's face. 'Because you can play to your strengths. If Kaiba likes shitting on you, let him do it. Give him as many openings as you can. You smile and you laugh and you take it. That's what this job is. You let him treat you like dirt if that's what he wants, and you deal to him, and you take his money.' His lips stretched in a yellow smile. 'Am I clear?'

* * *

The concrete pit of the KaibaCorp. parking garage was unguarded, though its black temperature turned Jounouchi's knuckles white. He stood out of the range of the electric orange lights that buzzed at him like dying cicadas and waited. The cold ate at him. He wore threadbare jeans and his old, good leather jacket – another of Honda's hand-me-downs he had had since high school – and stamped his booted feet against the ground for warmth. His breath misted.

He had considered, briefly, attempting to insinuate himself at the front desk. __Hi there! Katsuya Jounouchi, to see the big guy. Kaiba. An appointment? Haha, I don't need an appointment! The big guy and I go way back, known each other since high school. I duelled him at Battle City, you remember? No? Okay, hah, I guess it was a few years ago now! Can you give him a call, let him know I'm here? But, listen, I already told you – I don't need an appointment! We're friends from a long time ago. Just give him a buzz. Aw, c'mon, is this a face that would like to you? Kaiba and I, we're friends! Trust me, he'll be pissed off if he knew you didn't let me up. Do you want to piss him off?__

The humiliation of it made his chest burn just to imagine. Jounouchi reasoned he could probably keep up that kind of patter for three long minutes before security inevitably dragged him off the premises. Even if Kaiba wanted to see him, there was no way he'd be able to get in direct contact with him. Kaiba was a celebrity; how many stalkers and fans showed up demanding an audience?

Even more briefly, he toyed with giving the American a call. He still had the card, snug inside his wallet, and perhaps he could show that to the front desk. __C'mon, I'm on the Tanner account. You really gonna make me do this? Okay, I'll call him, and he's gonna be pissed about this, let me tell you!__

But he couldn't do it. The man wouldn't remember him, he probably gave out his number to every drunk idiot he ran into at these parties. Tanner would hang up on him, the receptionist would curl her lip in disgust and embarrassment, security would be called…

Jounouchi pulled his jacket more tightly around his shivering body. He didn't belong there, in an office. That was their world. That building lobby, its massive po-mo chandelier, its gaping empty spaces, like the inside of an enormous creature. Everything was too clean and organised, and everyone wore suits that fit like they'd be born in them. That wasn't Jounouchi's environment. It'd be like making a dog walk on its hind legs.

And so he had retreated to the parking garage. He manoeuvred around security cameras – not difficult, they only covered the car bays – and kept to the shadows in order to find the section where all the cars cost six figures. He couldn't say if Kaiba even stored his car here, but it was the only chance he had of catching him. And so Jounouchi found himself a dark corner of the garage to hide himself, and there he waited.

He removed a 10¥ coin from his pocket and walked it along his fingers. What a pointless skill to have learned. He could have invested that energy doing something useful, productive, __making himself marketable__. He spun the coin with deft familiarity. Every revolution shimmered with the waste of his life.

It didn't matter if Kaiba didn't show, not really, and it would give him a free excuse to ditch this gig. Takeda could go hang. Fuck him, fuck the lot of them. And he'd quit the job. He'd do something else. He could get back into deliveries, that was fine. He was good at lifting heavy things, picking up the bulk and weight of a thing then moving it to a place. Good, honest work. He was built for that. Tall and all thick, ropey muscles, like his father had been. Once had been, before the booze had eaten away his muscles and layered him with fat and sluggishness and, later, dementia. God, those last few weeks had been hell. Real hell.

 _ _Don't think about it, idiot__.

He shuffled about his pockets to find his phone and sought solace in its cracked screen. He refreshed this and that page, hoping for some message in a bottle from the outside world. Nothing, of course, as to be expected.

He navigated to his messages. He flicked between his conversations with Honda and Yuugi. He chewed the inside of his cheek, then flipped the coin.

Honda.

 _ _Ran into Kaiba last night__ , he typed. __Still a psycho loser. Go figure.__

He hit send and replaced the phone. It would be hours before he got a reply, knowing Honda. He had never been technologically savvy, and was even less so now with the baby.

Kaiba wouldn't come. Who's to say he was even working tonight, and if he did, what if he didn't head home until the morning? Was he to wait here until five, six, seven AM like a stray animal and hope for Kaiba to make his appearance? God, he hated it. He hated being the dog for Takeda or his dad or Kaiba or Yuugi, or…

He hated Kaiba so much it burned him. He hated how much he'd had to beg and scrape for the guy's approval – if not his emotional approval, then the bureaucratic approval of getting into Battle City, buying that fucking duel disc, working himself nearly to death to compete in a tournament that Kaiba didn't even want him entering. Kaiba was scum, he always had been. It made sense that the piece of shit was a cokehead now, that was what he deserved. He hoped it would kill him the end.

 _ _Better way to go than meth__ , Jounouchi reasoned, and that was probably, really, what had got his dad in the end.

 _ _Fuck you, Kaiba__.

He spat onto the concrete. The saliva frothed and dampened the bits of grit in the dirt. And then he left. If he never saw or heard from Kaiba Seto again, it would still be too soon.

* * *

Jounouchi's phone was ringing.

It was five AM on a Tuesday and Jounouchi was submerged in a deep, blank sleep. The ring was tinny. He cracked his eyes slowly, with reluctance. Likely it was Takeda, and Jounouchi had to make himself available day or night. Part of the job. As he reached and fumbled for the phone, he dared to entertain the brief hope that it might be Yuugi or Anzu, thriving on American time, blissfully unaware of the time difference. He peered at the screen. The number was not one he knew.

He pressed the answer button and negotiated the handset to his ear.

'Yeah?'

'He just played magical hats.'

These words reached Jounouchi on several distinct tides of confusion. First of all, the sentence made no sense. At five AM, the concept of __playing hats__ struck him with the absurdity of __Alice in Wonderland__. He might have immediately contextualised the phrase had the voice been Yuugi's, but though this voice was familiar it was not one he was accustomed to hearing on the phone. And the tone was savage, as though Jounouchi had committed some awful transgression and was now being held accountable.

'What?' said Jounouchi, this being the only possible response.

'Magical hats, idiot. Dark Magician Girl is in the graveyard, he holds a monster reborn, and yet he just played magical hats. What is __wrong__ with him?'

Jounouchi listened to the traffic lap at his consciousness. His head was throbbing.

'Can you hold on a sec?' he said, then gently placed the phone onto his bed. He sat upright. He took a large swig of water. He rubbed his eyes. He pinched himself. He picked up the phone again. 'Sorry about that, Kaiba, just had to make sure I hadn't died in my sleep and slipped into some fucking hell dimension in which Kaiba Seto calls me at five in the fucking morning to talk about – what the hell are you talking about?'

Kaiba's voice was acid. 'Turn on the television.'

Jounouchi removed the phone from his ear and stared at it like it had committed some terrible personal affront to him. His hatred for Kaiba had gently receded under a veneer of absurdity. 'I don't own a TV.'

Kaiba made two or three noises of surprise, annoyance, disgust, amusement, and exasperation that all seemed to overlap with one another. 'Turn on your laptop, then. Just find a USDM stream.'

'A you-ess-a what?'

There were more noises. 'The American channel that broadcasts Duel Monsters tournaments, Jounouchi. USDM. You can stream it from their website.'

'Why would I want to do that?'

'Because Yuugi is going to lose this duel.'

'Right.' Jounouchi took another mouthful of water, spilling much of it over his T-shirt. He blinked at the time on his phone in case the numbers might rearrange themselves into a less offensive time. His window showed a black sky pocked with city lights. 'Kaiba, it's five in the morning.'

'It's three PM in America,' Kaiba retorted, as though this cinched the argument.

'I'm going back to sleep.' He paused. His earlier angered disgust bubbled to the surface, pressing against the roof of his mouth, simmering. A starstorm of insults ricocheted around his head, about Yuugi and Mokuba and Kaiba's overtly miserable life. With the last ounce of grace in his body, he swallowed them. 'You've got some fucking nerve, asshole,' he croaked into the phone. Then he hung up.

Jounouchi lay down once more. In the drowsy, syrupy moments of confusion before sleep took him again, he felt the twin stings of surprise and regret wind through him. He should have listened to him. He should have tried harder. It could have been different.

 _ _But god damn__ , he thought, just before passing into unconsciousness, __what kind of freak calls you at five AM?__

At seven sixteen AM, Jounouchi's phone rang a second time. The melody filled his bedroom, that metallic pitch, and Jounouchi stared at his ceiling while he considered. The phone shrieked. He didn't bother looking at the number.

He didn't want to answer. The thought of putting the phone to his ear and hearing that soft, smug, vile voice slide into his ears made bile tickle his throat. The only thing to stop him hurling the phone across the room was that odd sensation of anticipated regret. It wasn't about Takeda; he had the number stored in his call history now regardless. It was something else. That __something__ that had made him speak to Kaiba on the balcony in the first place, in the blue light of the party with that deep weird jazz threading through their conversation. There was that sense that, should he not answer, then something rare and important would be lost. Something that –

The phone stopped ringing.

Jounouchi exhaled.

He had only eight seconds to consider experiencing regret before the phone rang for a third time. He smiled despite himself. He yawned, drank a cool mouthful of water, then reached for the handset.

'Kaiba, you're a lunatic.'

'Yuugi just lost,' Kaiba said rapidly. 'Yuugi just lost a duel to this Leo Ricci, the Italian champion. He had 300 life points remaining.'

Jounouchi sat up. Scratched the back of his neck. Picked a bit of dirt out from under his nail. 'So?'

'He __lost__ , Jounouchi.'

'Was it a shadow game?'

'Was it a…' There was a pause, then a rustle, and then Kaiba's voice came through more muffled: 'Kaoru, get out. Out, out.' Another pause, then Kaiba's voice again. He sounded vibrantly ill. 'Was it a __shadow game__? No, you absolute moron, it wasn't a shadow game. Of course it wasn't a shadow game. It's the international semi-finals, there are no shadow games.'

Slow with sleep, a migraine threading through his head, his eyes pulsing, Jounouchi could still not help but smile. 'I was joking, Kaiba.'

'300 life points, Jounouchi, 300. It wasn't even close.'

Jounouchi stood up, cracked his neck, then sat down again. He contemplated breakfast. He felt calmer than he had in months. 'I don't know, 300 sounds pretty close to me.'

Kaiba made some choked, sputtering noises, like an indignant train. 'You – it's – Jounouchi, Yuugi __lost__. Doesn't that mean anything to you?'

'Not really, man. Sometimes people lose duels. It happens. When you're one of the top players worldwide, you're going to lose duels occasionally. Yuugi's winrate is still, what, thirty percent higher than the second top ranked player worldwide.'

' _ _Twenty-six percent__ ,' Kaiba hissed down the phone.

'Oh my god, thirty, twenty-six, whatever.'

There was a pause. Jounouchi could hear Kaiba inhaling and exhaling deliberately. It sounded like he was doing breathing exercises.'

'I can't believe you didn't watch the duel.'

'I don't—' Jounouchi started, then cut himself off. He had been about to say, __I don't care about Yuugi's duel with the Italian whatever__ , but the truth of it surprised him. No, he didn't care about Yuugi's duels. Yuugi duelled professionally on a daily basis, and keeping up with them just wasn't something he had energy for like he once had. But Kaiba cared, so much so that it burned Jounouchi down the phone. 'I can't stay up to watch streams on US time, Kaiba. My work hours won't allow it. I can catch it later on their website if it's so damn important to you I give you my feedback.'

'I don't want your feedback, I don't want your opinion.' Kaiba's voice hissed low and intense, breathy and staccato, sharp against Jounouchi's ears. 'I thought you might have some insight on why Yuugi was playing so atrociously. My mistake. Your irrelevance to duelling is so great that you're not even aware of when an international duel with your supposed __friend__ is taking place. Clearly an error on my part to ever think you might have some worth to duelling.'

The phone clicked. Jounouchi removed it from his ear and examined it, floating from one state of bafflement to the next. It was quite impossible to determine which part of the phone call had been the most inexplicable.

And then he saw he had a reply from Honda. He opened the message.

 _ _wow that guy is such a freak. did he try to murder you this time?__

Jounouchi's fingers hesitated above the keys.

 _ _Not yet__ , he sent back.

In the shower, Jounouchi let unsoaped, lukewarm water thrum around him. He tried to think. He had never been a thinker, a planner. That was Yuugi's gig. He did things, and then he regretted them later. Or at least, that was how he once had been. Things were different now, if only barely. The brash hotheaded teenager that had once duelled Kaiba – and lost, and lost again – had slipped beneath layers and layers of time, work, loneliness, independence, sex, alcohol, death, life. He wasn't that kid any more, and he knew that more than ever as he found himself standing in the shower, not really thinking much of anything, as he decided whether or not he was going to call Kaiba back.

Kaiba made him feel sad. Really, truly fucked in his soul. Talking to him made all those years of growth curl away and made him feel stupid and young and vulnerable, but it also made him see what a perfect terrible fuck up Kaiba was. It stunned him that he had never seen it before. He hadn't changed. Kaiba was the same worthless loser he had always been.

Jounouchi turned off the water.

He scrubbed his hair with the one clean hand towel he had and padded through to his bedroom. He powered up his laptop and located the USDM website. There were photos and statistics and a lot of very angry comments arguing over why exactly Yuugi was variably the worst or best or most mediocre player to ever live. The site also told him that Yuugi would be beginning a new duel in exactly one minute, the evening session, with someone called Lisa Mountford.

Jounouchi looked out of his window. The upper floors of skyscraper behemoths spoiled much of his view, but the scraps of sky he could see were ripening into sharp yellows and thin blues. He breathed in and out, then picked up his phone.

 _ _So what's the odds on Yuugi vs Mountford?__

He hit send then firmly set the phone down on his desk and wandered into the kitchen to scrape together some kind of meal.

Jounouchi returned seven minutes later with a pile of things that could mostly be considered edible: one slice of stale bread with ketchup on it, a packet of chips, one bruised banana, and a leftover packet of luncheon meat.

He picked up his phone.

Six new messages. All from Kaiba.

He scrolled through in disbelief.

8:43AM: __No contest. 22/3 Yuugi wins.__

8:44AM: __Mountford has a chance-based deck. What an idiot.__

8:46AM: __DM on the field. Predictable.__

8:47AM: __600/1900 to Yuugi. Like fish in a barrel.__

8:49AM: _ _This isn't even a challenge.__

8:50AM: __Yuugi wins, but down to 1500LP. Embarrassing.__

Jounouchi stared at the phone. No answer presented itself. He typed two words.

 _ _You're nuts__

He barely had time to give the string of messages a second thought before his phone buzzed with a reply.

 _ _You've never held an opinion that couldn't be accommodated by two syllables, have you?__

Jounouchi snorted. In the impassivity of the textual medium he couldn't taste the hostility behind the words, if it was even there. He opened the chips.

 _ _I'm eating chips__ he texted back.

Kaiba did not reply to that one.

But four hours later he sent another, unprompted: __Electromagnetic turtle is such a vulgar card__.

Jounouchi had been in the midst of attempting to put together another meal and he stared at the message as though he were supposed to have some kind of useful response to it, then finally texted back, __I'm out of miso paste. Do I go to the store Y/N?__

Then Kaiba would not reply.

A few hours later, there was another text. __Did you really play Baby Dragon as much as your stats suggest?__

And Jounouchi shrugged and replied, without thought, __Yeah I guess. It got me through some tight spots in DK.__

 _ _It's a crutch card,__ came the almost instantaneous reply. __Amateurish. No wonder I beat you so easily.__

Jounouchi looked around the room as though appealing to an invisible audience. __Dude I didn't play BD when we first duelled__

 _ _Had you a better deck, you'd never need to play an embarrassing card like that.__

If Kaiba had said this to him in person, it would have tickled his ire. But here, in neutral electric hues, the message was mild, almost friendly. Kaiba probably hadn't meant it that way, but if there was one thing Jounouchi had learned about Kaiba it was that you never did anything on his turf.

He smiled to himself.

 _ _You're right. If I had 3 BEWDs I'd never lose.__

He pictured Kaiba, alone in his office, clenching his jaw and baring his teeth at his phone in rage. He pictured Kaiba throwing his phone out of the window in anger, then ordering his secretary bring him a new one. Or perhaps Kaiba was in the midst of typing, and he would merely cock an eyebrow at the message and then ignore it, deciding that Jounouchi was, after all, immensely unimportant to him—

 _ _You wouldn't be capable of summoning one Blue Eyes, yet alone three.__

Jounouchi smiled despite himself, a little with warmth and a little with pity. Kaiba had no one and abandoning him on the kerb was how he tried to prove that he liked it that way. Jounouchi wondered if Kaiba had made a single new friend since high school ended, if he had ever had a girlfriend, if he'd ever stayed up late watching a bad movie with his friends and laughing, the way Jounouchi and Yuugi and everyone had that last night of the summer before Anzu and Yuugi left…

His phone, unprompted, buzzed again.

But this time it wasn't Kaiba. It was Takeda's number.

 _ _6pm Friday usual place for pick up__

Jounouchi's heart dropped through him. He had, for short blissful hours, forgotten about Takeda, about the parties, about all those beautiful hyena women and the men in shiny suits who smelled like sulphur.

The phone buzzed again.

 _ _got KS' number yet?__

Jounouchi watched the phone and felt it watch him back. The characters stood bold and black behind the cracked screen.

It buzzed a third time. Jounouchi hadn't bothered to enter Kaiba's name into his contacts, but he recognised the number and the distinctly Kaiba-esque syntax.

 _ _It's an insult to the dignity of Duel Monsters that you should be permitted to play.__

Jounouchi held the phone and touched the glowing characters. He considered his options. He was behind on rent. He needed to keep Takeda happy. He should be grateful for this job, he shouldn't risk compromising it. Kaiba deserved everything that was coming to him and more, and it would be doing the world a favour to give Kaiba a kick into the pit he so liked to hang himself over.

It was, he now realised, raining, like it had been a few nights ago. He had nowhere to go then, and he had nowhere to go now. It was an easy decision for so many reasons.

The thought of seeing Takeda again this week made his stomach roil and slime. Yellow headlights peered into his window, crested the ceiling, then slid onwards. He composed two messages.

 _ _I'm making progress. see you later.__ This he sent to Takeda.

 _ _You want me to watch the next duel you'll have to lend me your TV.__ This he sent to Kaiba.

It took longer for Kaiba to reply this time, but not so long that he could have conceivably been distracted by any other matters.

 _ _Fine. Now stop bothering me.__

Jounouchi breathed out, lowered the phone, and watched the rain distort the street lights. He thought about how impossibly weird it had been to see Kaiba on that balcony, and the sound of his voice, and where any of this was going, and all around him the noise and glimmer of dirty degraded downtown curled about him, humming and burning.


	3. The Water

Jounouchi had been stealing magazines since childhood. He was a lazy shoplifter, one who took things on impulse, and magazines were exactly the kind of thing he wanted but didn't need. It was a habit he never really gave up and one he didn't think Yuugi had ever known about, like his smoking and low-stakes gambling and other things he pretended he didn't do when trying to make something better of his life. Not that it mattered, not that any of those things mattered; shop-lifting was just something he _did_. It didn't shame him, it wasn't transgressive. It was a habit, nothing more. Though he had found himself doing it more so recently than he used to, especially on the way back from the 7/11 when he was hit with that sudden, bright, rich impulse to grab a zine off the outside rack and keep walking. No one noticed and he never got caught. And on the way back from getting tobacco and soda he found Kaiba's face staring back at him, pasted on the front page of some pop-economics magazine, and he took it without thinking. No one saw or cared. Because Kaiba had no business appearing in the shitty main drag of this corner of downtown Domino. His face was an insult to these people. Jounouchi was, in a way, doing the world a favour.

He let himself into his apartment and threw himself onto the bed, then tossed the magazine down in front of him. He covered half of the front page text with tobacco and a rizla, rolling it as he stared down Kaiba's paper replica.

The photo was glossy, retouched. Fragments of tobacco ghosted his face like leaves on a lake. He looked unreal, but this unreality was of a different taste to that which Jounouchi had encountered in that weird party. He had seen dozens of publicity shots of Kaiba over the years, even before he met the guy and didn't know what KaibaCorp was. As a child, the faces of beautiful wealthy strangers filled his magazines, billboards, TV screens, and they were all of them a kind of hierarchy of peculiar angels. They were other, distant, unreachable.

He hadn't picked out Kaiba as an individual until after they had met. Then he would start to recognise him in interviews and press announcements. In those early years, Kaiba was just as he was when duelling: furious, alive, magnificent, obnoxious. He calmed over the years. Jounouchi would see him in suits more often than those ridiculous coats, more often speaking from a desk or a lab than a helicopter.

And here he met him again, smart in a navy two piece, posing against his desk. There was still that bright, snide shimmer to his eyes, his lip ever so slightly cocked, but there was something dry and static to him as well. Jounouchi studied the contours of his photoshopped face. It was impossible to read anything into that expression. He wasn't a person here. He was one of those _other_ things again.

Jounouchi tossed the magazine across the room. He wasn't going to read the interview it advertised. As if he needed to hear about however many billions Kaiba was worth and how many new products he was debuting. It wasn't as though he could afford them, and he wasn't going to save up, not again. That was a dead, awful ambition. He had to have something else to look forward to than buying Kaiba's shit to play duels he had no chance of winning.

But he missed it. Oh, fuck, he missed duelling and Yuugi and the infinite possibilities of it all so much that his chest burned.

He sniffed and wiped his nose. He was acting like a stupid kid, wanting to go back in time and be that person again. That was all over. He had to move on.

A clumsy knock rattled his door, then Sugata's broad face peered into the room. Sugata had one of those faces that was always a little too greasy, a little too sweaty for you to think he could be in good health. His mouth was wide and his teeth were all neat yellow blocks, like someone was building some horrid piece of brutalism in there.

'How much do you make these days?' Sugata's voice was like the texture of his skin: thick, greasy, with bits floating in it.

'None of your business.' Jounouchi picked up another stolen magazine. 'I'm not lending you money.'

'Dude, you must be making, what, man, hundreds of thousands a night to afford one of these TVs.'

Jounouchi looked up again. 'What?'

'The delivery guy wants you to sign for it. It's fucking huge, it's like a…' Sugata's brain rifled through its drawers in search of something that conveyed bigness. 'Like those ones they have in the main square. Like those really big TVs.'

Jounouchi, full of confusion laced with misplaced dread, swung himself off the bed and came to the door. Sugata's threadbare T-shirt stank of smoke.

The delivery guy stared them down like even he was too good for this job.

'You Jounouchi Katsuya?'

'Who's asking?'

The delivery guy rolled his eyes. 'Just sign here.'

Between them, taking up most of the hall, was a TV of obscene size whose box listed a cavalcade of features so extensive that it might as well have been advertising its capability for interplanetary flight.

'I didn't order a TV,' said Jounouchi, nonplussed. 'I can't pay for this.'

'Look, it's already paid for, and I carried it all the way up here, so can you just sign for the thing? I'm not taking it back.'

Jounouchi clenched his teeth and felt the tension spark through his spine. He hadn't felt this kind of anger in months, years. It felt different; a little good, a little bad.

 _Fucking Kaiba._

'Whatever. I'll sign for it.'

He did so, and watched with folded arms as Sugata dragged the huge cardboard box into the living room. The room was trashed; Sugata slept on the couch in a rat's nest of sheets and jackets. A bowl of cigarettes overflowed ash into the carpet and everywhere empty bowls, glasses, and food wrappers crowded the floor.

'Do you want it in your room?'

'No. Take it. I don't want it.'

'You sure, dude?' Sugata scratched the back of a filthy neck. 'That thing is worth hundreds of thousands.'

'Do what you want with it. I don't give a shit.' Jounouchi felt the anger seethe within him. It built and built, hot and rank, climbing his throat. He was on fire. He wanted to put his fist through something.

He strode out, slammed the door, found his phone, dialled.

It rang four times.

'Kaiba.' The voice was neutral, automatic.

'Did you buy me a fucking TV?'

There was a pause, and it seemed Kaiba was genuinely trying to remember.

'Ah – yes, two days ago. Or my secretary did.'

'Why the fuck did you buy me a TV?' Jounouchi could not quite explain why he was so angry, but he knew with deep certainty that Kaiba had wronged him somehow.

'You wanted to watch the USDM stream. You asked for a TV.'

'I asked you to _lend_ me _your_ TV, not fucking buy me one! I don't want this!'

'Why? It has to be better than whatever trash you're watching television on currently.' A small, smug noise of laughter slunk down the phone. 'Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot you don't own a television.'

'When I suggested you lend me yours, I meant I would watch the match with you. Why the hell do you think I would want a new fucking TV?'

'Embarrassed you could never afford anything so good?'

'I don't want a TV, Kaiba! Do you not get that? I don't own a TV because I don't want one. I didn't want one yesterday, I didn't want one this morning, and how there's some giant fuck-off flat screen in my living room I still don't want one. Send someone to take it back.'

'Why? Whether you want one or not, you need one. How else will you effectively watch the USDM streams? The lag is terrible on the website, I assure you. This is much better.'

Jounouchi took a long breath. 'You're an idiot, Kaiba. You're really fucking stupid. I can't believe – go to hell, okay?'

This time, there was annoyance and a genuine confusion to Kaiba's voice. 'I don't see the problem. You needed a television, I bought you one. The money is inconsequential to me.'

And then Jounouchi understood why this was making him angry. For once, it wasn't a slight. Kaiba wasn't trying to make him feel bad for being poor. Kaiba just wanted him to watch Yuugi's duels so he could have someone to yell nonsense at about hand statistics and winrate percentages – but Jounouchi didn't own a TV. It was a simple problem with a simple solution: buy Jounouchi a TV. Like he was a faulty car who needed its carburettor replacing.

Once again, the pity and anger started to fight it out within him.

'Oh my god, Kaiba.' He ran a hand over his face. 'Don't do shit like this. Just fucking don't. I will never speak to you ever again if you pull something like this one more time.'

The other side of the phone sniffed. 'I do not care either way if you ever speak to me again. Why on earth would you think something so absurd?'

' _I_ don't care if _you_ don't care–' Jounouchi started, then swallowed. 'I'm just telling you this. Just sharing a piece of information. Don't disrespect me like that.'

'Is there some other way I'm supposed to treat you? Do you think someone like me could ever have respect for someone like you?'

Jounouchi closed his eyes. He thought, for no reason at all, of stars, then the Red Eyes, and then the eyes of that beautiful cold woman who opened the door for him at the party. If he had Kaiba in the room, he would have hit him. He would have sunk his fists into his face until he spat blood.

'Okay, Kaiba. Do what you want.' He breathed in thinly and his lungs filled with gasoline. 'I don't give a shit. I'm not watching your fucking duelling channel. How about you hire someone to do that for you? As you've said, it's not like you can't afford it.'

He hung up. He could feel his nails vibrating, he could feel his teeth like lumps of molten metal in his face.

'What was that about?'

Jounouchi turned. Sugata lurked at the door.

'It doesn't matter. Just some prick.'

'Your boss buy you that TV?'

'Takeda? No. The fuck would you think that?'

Sugata shrugged a bare, slimy shoulder. 'He might be the type. Buy you nice things.'

Jounouchi's face scrawled into an expression of disgust. 'He's a dealer, Sugata, not a pimp. I don't do that kind of work. You know that.'

'I believe you, man, you don't have to justify yourself.' He shrugged again. 'It's a nice TV.'

'Then you can have it. I don't want it.'

Sugata's wide eyes widened more. 'You sure?'

'Push it out the window for all I care. If I–'

His phone rang again. Jounouchi clenched his teeth until his head throbbed and stars erupted before his vision.

'You shouldn't answer it,' said Sugata, as though this was wise, ancestral advice.

'No, I shouldn't.' Jounouchi watched the numbers pulse against the screen, a string of digits he was getting to know like you get to know the stray cats in your neighbourhood who always spook when you get too close. 'He's such a fucking asshole.'

The phone stopped ringing. Jounouchi breathed out sweet, metallic relief.

The phone rang again.

'Oh my fucking god. Does he not have a fucking company to run?'

He hit the answer button, raised the phone to his hear, opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. He waited. He could hear Kaiba's breathing.

'Jounouchi?'

He held his own breath and waited. He fantasised about breaking Kaiba's nose and it never healing right.

'I can hear the car alarm outside your apartment. I know you're there.'

Jounouchi had played these games before. He threw himself down onto the bed, grabbed his cigarette and lighter, lit up, and waited.

'Jounouchi? Stop acting like a child. You are throwing a tantrum over a television. It's unbecoming.'

The sirens swelled outside. Jounouchi felt the calm gradually seep through him along with the smoke. He didn't want to break Kaiba's face any more.

'Fine, you do what you want. I'm embarrassed for you.' The phone clicked.

Jounouchi didn't hesitate before redialling. Kaiba answered it immediately.

'Jounouchi?'

Jounouchi let the sound of sirens and traffic fill the phone, but said nothing. He heard Kaiba breathe out in irritation, disappointment, humour – he couldn't tell.

'Don't call this number again,' said Kaiba, and the second before Jounouchi was sure he'd hang up he spoke.

'Hey Kaiba!'

There was no click. He stayed on the line.

Jounouchi didn't think. He had never been a planner, not then and not now. He let the thoughts drifting on the surface of his mind spill out of his mouth. He was hungry. He wanted udon: fat, beefy, oily.

'I'm hungry. I'm going to be at the Oishī diner on Susu street at 8pm. You can meet me there and buy me dinner.'

Kaiba's breath embossed the texture of the phone's static hum. Jounouchi tried and failed to interpret whatever mad emotions might be running through Kaiba's head.

'Why on earth would I do that?

'How should I know? Why would you buy me a TV? But be there or don't. If you want me to watch those stupid Duel Monsters streams, then show up. I'm giving you this last chance – and you don't fucking deserve it.'

He hung up before he could think better of it. Worst came to worst, he would get a free meal. He would never turn that down.

* * *

The Oishī diner was a dive: sticky tables, sticky floors, waiters with sticky hands. It smelled like soy, burnt food, and piss. His dad used to bring him here on special occasions. Jounouchi and Honda would eat here in their young teens, spending stolen change on flat soda. It smelled like home.

Jounouchi had not really expected Kaiba to show. It would be ridiculous to see him here, the perfect weird freak Kaiba Seto looking like an insect crammed into a worsted wool suit pretending it was a human. It would be impossible to see him sitting in this piece of shit diner and eating its food like he actually needed sustenance and didn't subsist entirely off flies that landed on his tongue. And even if he was somehow planning to show, Jounouchi figured he'd be late. It would be like that time he faked them out on Alcatraz and Jounouchi thought he'd killed himself. He never did things on other people's schedule.

Jounouchi almost burst out laughing when he found that Kaiba was already there.

He was sat in a booth, his face cobwebbed in a frown, an untouched cup of tea before him, typing on his phone with a now-familiar rapidity. In the dim light of the party and surrounded by the kind of vain, sick individuals that comprised those parties, he had looked fine. But in the winter light of day he looked faded and ugly. His skin was dry and kind of cracked, especially around the mouth, and his hair was flat. His skin had an unpleasant sweaty sheen. He clearly hadn't slept. Jounouchi felt that now familiar mix of pity and anger, like that he had felt for Yuugi when they first met, so long ago.

Jounouchi swung in across from him. 'Yo, Kaiba.'

Kaiba did not glance up from his phone, but his fingers did pause in their onslaught of the keys. 'You're late.'

Jounouchi pulled a face. 'No I'm not.'

Kaiba wrapped up whatever he was typing, then gently set the phone onto the filthy table. He delicately pulled up the sleeve of his jacket – a deep blue blazer, and expensive – and inclined his wrist in Jounouchi's direction. Jounouchi read the silver and blue face of a KC brand watch.

'It says eight o' clock.'

Kaiba met his eyes with withering disgust. 'It says eight-oh-two. Can you not tell the time? I would have thought for someone who won half his duels with an awful card like Time Wizard you might be familiar with a clock face.'

Jounouchi watched Kaiba say this like he was some kind of talking museum exhibit, like those recreations of medieval peasant life with mechanical mannequins that acted out ancient weird customs and said the same phrase to whomever walked past. He laughed and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck.

'Okay, Kaiba. I'm late. I'm sorry. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?' He put his hands together in mock-prayer. 'Please, Kaiba-sama. I beseech you.'

'Would you stop embarrassing yourself?' Kaiba's lips contracted like he was trying to suppress a grimace of pain and his gaze flicked from Jounouchi to the window, distracted by something, as he had been the other night when they met. Whatever occupied him, it was far away from their little booth.

'I'm glad you agreed to meet with me,' Jounouchi said, keeping his tone intensely reasonable. He was going to be like a serene meadow full of flowers and pampas grass and shit in the face of Kaiba's jagged hostility. 'I didn't think you'd show.'

Kaiba tossed him the expected smirk, though his eyes were still looking away. 'You certainly do care a lot about what I think of you.'

'I really don't. I'm just... you know, Yuugi used to worry about you, and you didn't deserve it then, and you sure as hell don't deserve my concern now. But your behaviour is totally insane. I mean, you called me at five AM—'

'I called you at five AM because I get up early,' Kaiba said, his voice like sandpaper and his eyes suddenly on Jounouchi, though he was still an infinite glacial distance away. 'Not all of us sleep in until noon like degenerates.'

Jounouchi pursed his lips. He took a breath. _Wrong tack._ 'Okay. How did you get my number?'

Kaiba was looking out of the window again. 'It wasn't difficult.'

'Be honest, man. It's creepy. I don't mean creepy in the "ooh-big-secret-billionaire-can-do-what-he-wants" kind of way, I mean in the "some-guy-I-don't-really-know-stole-my-number-and-it's-weird-and-gross" kind of way. I don't fucking like it.'

Kaiba's eyes shut for a moment. The moment went on, stretched itself, and Jounouchi waited for Kaiba to open them again. He didn't. Jounouchi glanced around.

'Uh, Kaiba—?'

His eyes opened. 'I asked my security team. It took them twenty minutes, and that includes the time it took them to walk back to their offices and probably chat about soap operas at the water cooler. I imagine your number was publicly listed somewhere in conjunction with your name, probably on a Duel Monsters register.'

'Okay. Thanks for telling me.'

Kaiba was back to looking out the window. Jounouchi was briefly saved from needing to eke their way through their parody of conversation by the appearance of the waiter, a large man with tree trunk forearms.

'What can I get you fellas?'

'I'll have the beef brisket udon and a coke. Kaiba?'

Kaiba performed a weird gesture, partly a headshake and partly the wave of a hand. It seemed to indicate 'nothing'.

'Oh come on, you gotta eat something. He'll have…' Jounouchi scanned the menu and settled at random on some kind of fish stew. He jabbed at it with his finger. 'He'll have that.'

The waiter retreated, and then they were back to the odd stalemate of Kaiba staring out of the window – which was, Jounouchi now fully registered, frosted and filthy and impossible to actually see through – and Jounouchi trying to hack his way through conversation. He tested out the impulse of breaking Kaiba's nose, but now his thoughts were occupied with food it no longer appealed. Something suddenly occurred to him.

'Hey Kaiba, did you ever graduate high school?'

This convinced Kaiba to flick up his gaze to eye contact. 'What?'

'High school. I never saw you in class in the later years. I didn't even know if you were still enrolled.'

Kaiba frowned. 'No, I never graduated. I didn't need to.'

Jounouchi punched the air. 'Sweet! I bested you academically. Never thought I'd see the day.'

'Jounouchi. I did not come here to make small talk with you. I agreed to this meeting because I thought you had some insight to offer on Yuugi's playstyle, which might have a gross overestimation of your abilities.'

'Is that really why you came?'

Kaiba's eyes were blank. 'Of course. What more could you possibly have to offer me?'

Jounouchi did not reply to that. What could he offer Kaiba? Friendship, like Yuugi had tried to offer him for years. But Kaiba had never taken it. He had only wanted a rival, something to define himself against, like the tide against the shore. He barely even treated them all like human beings, and he had treated Jounouchi like the worst kind of shit. He wondered again why he was there.

The waiter brought the food, and Jounouchi remembered. A free meal.

He sank chopsticks into the oily water. 'Well, Kaiba, what do you want to know? I can offer you my opinion on anything Yuugi-playstyle-related, as long as it's to do with the Leo Ricci duel because I haven't read up on anything else he's done in years.' He slurped the noodles thickly. Kaiba's mouth was a perfect horizontal.

'Yuugi's strategy. Your opinions?'

'Yeah, sure. Uh, I read the hand history. I thought Yuugi played well. He always does, you know. The loss was mostly bad luck.'

'Nonsense. He lost because he played weakly.'

'Dude, he played fine. Not everyone can get lucky every time.'

'You think everything is about luck and chance and gambling, don't you?'

Jounouchi chased the ice cubes around his coke with his straw. 'Nah. Just some things. Sometimes the cards you draw, you know, there's an element of luck.'

'Luck is for amateurs.'

'Kaiba, you always play super aggressively. You build beatdown decks. There are other strategies than just brute force.' He rolled his shoulders and felt a good, satisfying crack go through him. 'Have you ever considered… not doing that?'

Kaiba made a noise that could be interpreted as a laugh if you really strained your ears. 'I suppose I could consider rebuilding my decks to more closely resemble yours and learn to enjoy constantly losing.'

'Kaiba, card games are supposed to be _fun_. Why don't you get that? It's not all about winning and getting somewhere. Losing is not as big a deal as you make it out to be.'

It had seemed for a few minutes that he was making some kind of progress, a sense of throwing some kind of light into the endless, black, hollow, dripping pointlessness of Kaiba's emotional spillway, but that light receded in an instant. The faint playfulness that Jounouchi could almost trace in his features withered, and in its place was only bile. He couldn't imagine what he had said to brook such a sudden shift. Kaiba's gaze slid away again, back through the filthy window, seeing something in the grime and dead insects that Jounouchi couldn't.

'Kaiba?'

Kaiba suddenly met his eyes. 'Do you want to know my net worth?'

Jounouchi shrugged. 'Sure. What is it?'

'Fifty billion USD.'

Jounouchi extracted a curled, black hair from his soup. 'What's one dollar in yen?'

'113 point three, last I checked.'

'Oh. So fifty million times that?'

' _Billion_ , idiot.'

'Oh, right.' Jounouchi fed a fat wad of noodles into his mouth. 'These are so good. They do something to made them extra oily.' He slurped loudly. 'So a billion is ten million, yeah?'

'Are you joking?'

Jounouchi pulled Kaiba's untouched bowl towards him. 'Dude, I make, uh…' He ran some mental math and counted on his fingers. '250 _you-ess-dee_ —', he mimicked Kaiba's accent, 'a week. A million, a billion, you might as well tell me you made sixty pounds of fairy dust this year.'

Kaiba stared through the yellow window. 'I want to hit sixty billion by the end of next year. Have you heard of MonsterWorks?'

'Nope.'

'You wouldn't have. It's a social network and gaming platform.' His knuckles whitened as he tightened them about his cup. 'If it's successful, we'll make billions.'

'Okay. Why are you telling me this?'

Kaiba shook his head, but the gesture didn't seem to be directed at Jounouchi. 'I thought it might be useful for you to educate yourself on developments in the tech sector.'

Jounouchi rolled his eyes. 'Yeah, sure, whatever.' He thought about punching Kaiba again, tumbled that thought around his head, then let it recede. He slapped his palms down on the table in a gesture of getting-things-done. 'Man, what is up with you? Why are you telling me all this? Why are you texting me? Why were you at that stupid party?'

Kaiba regarded him with a level gaze. 'Why are you listening to all this? Why are _you_ texting _me_? Why were _you_ at that party?'

'I guess we were both there to work, huh?'

'Is dealing a form of work?'

Jounouchi gritted his teeth and swallowed hard. He wasn't going to let himself get baited. 'Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is. I provide a product, people purchase it. People like yourself.'

Kaiba wasn't getting caught in that trap again. 'And what else do you deal?'

'I told you, man, just coke. I haven't even been doing it long.'

'Stop lying to me.'

Jounouchi nearly spat out his drink. 'I'm not fucking lying. What is with you all of a sudden? We were almost having a normal conversation.'

'How are we supposed to have a _conversation_ if you won't stop _lying_ to me?'

Jounouchi thought, briefly, about killing him. 'I'm not, you fucking asshole. Why do you have to do this? Why can't you talk to someone like a normal human being? You have to pick a fight the moment you think you might be on a level playing field with someone.'

'I'm saying this because you won't stop _lying_ to me.'

'I am not fucking lying to you.'

'You dealt methamphetamines as well.' Kaiba spoke with a voice full of soft, even sand. There was something flat in his eyes, like something in there had been blown out.

Jounouchi leaned back. He could hear forks against plates, words coming out of mouths, people being normal and living normal lives. 'Fuck you. I never dealt meth.'

'Liar.'

'I know what meth does to a person, okay? I've seen too much of that shit. I wouldn't sell it to anyone.'

'Did you do freebies, then? I can understand your wanting to offer a family discount.'

A horrible hot disgust and guilt and anger bore through the centre of Jounouchi's stomach.

'You fucking asshole,' he spat. 'You have no idea what you're talking about.'

Kaiba's eyes were two thin black zeroes. 'I know exactly what I'm talking about.

Jounouchi wanted to crack his face into a hundred pieces, wanted to smash his face into the side of the table until his eyes popped, wanted to coat himself in blood. He took a single breath. 'What, you think because you got your dad killed, I must've done the same? Fuck you.'

Jounouchi stood and backed away from the table. Even as he exited the diner, with Kaiba's eyes trained on him, Kaiba did not seem to react. If there was any emotion in there, it seemed to be something resembling victory, though Jounouchi could not for the life of him understand what Kaiba thought he had won.

* * *

Jounouchi reached his apartment and stalked into his bedroom and slammed the door. He hadn't taken a second step before he almost slipped on something. He glanced down and saw, with a jolt, Kaiba's face staring up at him again. It was the magazine from earlier. Was the Kaiba he had seen today the same as this spectral thing on the magazine? He picked it up and considered spitting on the cover. The image warped in his tense fingers.

Sugata pushed his door open without knocking. 'Don't make so much noise, man, I was asleep.'

Jounouchi stuffed the magazine into his pocket. 'Maybe if you got out of bed before 9pm you wouldn't have this issue.'

Sugata looked aggrieved. 'Hey, I work the night shift, man. Don't get up in my face about this.' He cocked his head like he was focusing all his energies on figuring out Jounouchi's problem. 'Hey, you still upset about that TV?'

'Maybe.'

'Who bought it? Was it the guy you were yelling at on the phone?'

Jounouchi groaned, ran a hand over his face. 'He's… someone I used to work with.'

'Sounded like he was giving you shit.'

'Yeah, well. He's a jackass.'

'But he bought you a TV.' Sugata picked something out of his ear while watching Jounouchi with fat jaundiced eyes.

'Man, that's part of his jackassery. He wants to rub it in my face that I can't afford one. Or he wants to treat me like his fucking staff.'

'He has staff?'

'Yes, Sugata,' Jounouchi sighed, then rubbed his eyes. Another migraine was uncurling somewhere back there. He inhaled sharply. 'Look, do you want to go out? Hit the bar or something, get wasted? I can't stay in this apartment.'

Sugata shrugged that slow, slurring shrug again. 'You got money?'

'No.'

Sugata looked back to the hallway, back to Jounouchi, back to the hallway. 'You wanna sell the TV?'

* * *

Sugata was not a friend. Sugata had no friends, just people he didn't owe. But he paid the rent on time and he kept to himself, and that was all Jounouchi wanted in a roommate. He could have roomed with any number of people; god knows he'd received offers. Once Yuugi and Honda left, Jounouchi started filling his days with his old haunts, the old bars, the gambling dens, the patchwork hellholes that made up his childhood. Once he started showing up there with nowhere else to go, familiar faces emerged like woodworms. That was how he got the job with Takeda. So many people he used to know, or people just the same as those he used to know, boys with hollow eyes and butterfly knives that lived in squats, warehouses, stacks of shipping containers. They had short lives and a high turnover rate, long faces and set jaws, black under their fingernails like tar. Jounouchi was someone like them who had made it past twenty-five and that gave him a mythic quality. But he couldn't slip back into that life, he couldn't be the big brother these kids so desperately wanted. They were all of them drowning and they would drag you down with them. Jounouchi couldn't take care of them the way Yuugi had taken care of him. The best those kids could hope for was to keep their heads above the water long enough for the drugs to kill them.

Then there was the older generation. Men and women who took him for an urisen and offered him security and a warm bed. Every conversation with those people felt like falling down a long black storm drain.

He had refused all that. Instead, he had holed up in a cybercafe for a day and answered every craiglist ad for a spare room he could find. And thus he met Sugata. Too idle, too lacking in not only ambition but any real sense of self to join the gangs, Sugata preferred to spend his days smoking and drinking and playing video games, making his money working the till at the 7/11 night shift. He was an oily mirror of a person: everything bounced or slid off him. He repelled importance, permanence, seriousness. He lit his cigarettes like Honda had, way back when, and perhaps it had been that which pushed Jounouchi to move into the bedroom of Sugata's tiny piece of shit apartment, while Sugata slept on the lounge futon.

They took the TV to the first pawn shop they came across, both of them quickly exhausted by lugging the thing down the street. They cleared a good two hundred thousand for it, which Jounouchi was more than happy with, even though it was easily worth twice that. Carrying the thing around was weirdly humiliating. Then they immediately took themselves to the local rathole bar and put down ten thousand on bottles of rice wine, which they set to drinking like it was oxygen.

Sugata rambled about shit Jounouchi didn't care about, something about some level in a video game with a dragon he had to defeat but couldn't, and Jounouchi stared into the bottom of his glass and hated Kaiba with every sinew, every vessel, every bone that ran through him. The more he drank, the more he hated him. And he hated Yuugi, too. And Honda, and his ugly baby. Kaiba was, really, just the face of a problem. They had all moved on and weren't coming back, and he was left alone, the dregs circling the drain.

But Kaiba was the same. Kaiba was all alone at the top of that tower and hating the closest thing to a friend he had because that was the only way he knew how to do anything. Pity and anger, such familiar mixers, swam against each other. He felt an acidic maelstrom burn through him. He needed to beat the shit out of someone, or for someone to beat the shit out of him. Picking a fight with Sugata would be pointless, the guy would fold like cards, but there were plenty of other prospects in the bar.

'I hate Kaiba Seto.'

'What, the Konami CEO?'

'KaibaCorp. He should have thrown himself off that castle tower when he had the chance.'

Sugata downed his glass. 'I liked _Blue Eyes Flight Simulator VII_. The one where they teamed up with Google Maps and you can fly around the real world as a dragon.'

'I've never played any of his stupid games. He's just an asshole. I went to school with him.'

Sugata's eyes expanded into perfect round balls. 'Dude, no way.'

'Who cares, you know? Celebrities are all the same. Rich pieces of shit that only care about themselves. I wish he would fucking kill himself.'

'Do you think Steve Jobs killed himself?'

Jounouchi looked at his drinking partner with disgust. 'What the fuck are you talking about?'

'Just because we're on the subject of CEOs dying.'

Jounouchi shook off the comment and downed the last of his drink. He poured another, gulped at that, refilled his glass, then started fingering a strange wad of paper curiosity lodged in his pocket. He clumsily pulled it out and held it before his drunken gaze. It was the magazine he'd stolen earlier. He flipped through to the interview. The words were gibberish: _latest in the series, another guaranteed bestseller, captured the hearts and minds of millions,_ blah blah blah. Then some bullshit questions about Kaiba's personal life that probed for the girlfriend the interviewer was apparently convinced he kept secret. Jounouchi snorted. As if any woman could tolerate Kaiba for more than five minutes. Unless he was paying them.

Jounouchi turned the page and spat sake over the pages. A photo of Kaiba dominated the spread, one the editor must have picked for seeming charismatic and confident, but which to Jounouchi came across as crazed. A spray of female celebrities had been pasted around him, each of their faces against a bright, badly photoshopped background. The page hinted that one of these 'lucky ladies' was unquestionably Kaiba's secret lover and it was just a question now of discerning which. Jounouchi vaguely recognised some of the women – two actresses, two singers, one minor princess – but there in the corner, staring up at him with electric beauty and ferocity, was Mai.

He read the copy before he could stop himself.

' _Kujaku Mai! The top female duellist in Japan and a grade-A hottie to boot! Kaiba and this talented babe have been in many tournaments together – was this the battleground that sparked a secret love affair?'_

He wanted to throw up. The idea of Kaiba and Mai – the image of Mai, perfect, her soft hair, her sweet breath, against Kaiba's face – the sickness of it – her lips on his, her waist in his hands, the arc of her back beneath him – god, it was obscene. He saw her breasts in his hands, his lips covering them, his long fingers inside her exquisite cunt that he had once loved so much. Nausea roiled through him.

'Hey, Sugata. You think Kujaku fucked her way into Battle City?'

Sugata stared at him uncomprehending. 'Huh?'

Jounouchi jabbed the page. His head swum. 'This chick. Do you think she fucked Kaiba?'

Sugata's expression was as blank as an infinite empty desert. 'Sure. Maybe. Who is she?'

Jounouchi cracked his neck. 'Fucking bitch.' He found his phone, which took longer than it should have, and negotiated it to the table. He clumsily trawled his way through his contacts. The names bled together. There was Kaiba's number, still unsaved. First he hit edit and coded the number to a name: _useless fucking loser_. Then he composed a message.

'Hey asshole. If you find a spare moment when you're not reliving murdering your dad could you let me know how many women you made fuck you so they could duel in BC? Aside from Kujaku I mean.'

He hit send. The anger filled him hotter than the wine. He needed to do more. This wasn't enough.

He stumbled from his chair. 'I'm going to make a… a fucking phone call, alright?'

Next thing he knew he was outside, not remembering the trip. The present came in disconnected bright bursts. The night was black and thick like thick fingers over his face. He dialled the familiar number.

The phone went to voicemail. Jounouchi listened to the answering message unspool into his ears, then spat on the sidewalk after the tone.

'I don't miss you,' he said. He could taste how his words came out weird and unfocused. 'I don't miss your smell or your hair or… I don't miss any of it. I don't want you in my life, okay? You gotta know that, because I'm not calling because I miss you, I'm…' Vomit tickled his throat and he spat again. 'I'm calling you to let you know you're a bitch, Mai. You're a stuck up, cold bitch. You only get people to like you by… by…' He could sense this was going wrong, that what he was doing had gone off course, like he was on a roller-coaster and the track ahead was broken and yet the carriage kept hurling through the air… 'You have to fuck people to get them to like you, right? Or make them think you're going to fuck them. I bet that's the only way you get into tournaments, because it sure as shit can't be your duelling skills. You cheated your way into Duellist Kingdom, bet you fucked your way into Battle City.' The nausea began to burn through him. He hung up, vomited, vomited again, felt thick undigested udon lodge in his soft palate. He thought about beating Kaiba into messes. He thought about his blood on the pavement, and under his nails, and in his hair. And then he didn't think about anything.


	4. Under the Rocks

Kujaku Mai listened to the voicemail once as she applied a bold shade of matte heather grey lipstick before her golden reflection. She tamed an errant curl with expert, practised grace, and did not pause as the ghost of her ex-boyfriend called her a bitch. She approved her perfect lashes, the hang of her heavy fringe, the high press of her chest and did not blink as the voicemail rambled on.

' _You cheated your way into Duellist Kingdom, bet you fucked your way into Battle City_.'

As it beeped off, she spared the view a final glance. This suite was on the west side of the Ume hotel and allowed a vast, amber vista of spinal skyscrapers, the ocean, the distant sunset. Kaiba spared no expense. With the city sprawling below her, she remembered the blimp. She remembered the wind, the taste of salt in the air, and she remembered the sand covering her face... It had taken months to get over the newfound fear of heights.

Mai picked up the phone from the bed, her keys, the lipstick, and stowed them in a violet purse. She shrugged on a white suede jacket and, satisfied she had forgotten nothing, left the hotel room. At the restaurant off the hotel lobby, she asked of the waiter where her guest could be found and was led towards the back of a restaurant that was all dim golds and table linen like the first snow. She was led to the best table, of course, as if she had expected anything else.

She approached, smiling like phosphorescence. 'Kaiba.' She offered her hand and Kaiba grasped it politely.

'Kujaku.'

'Aren't we formal?' She took a seat and rested her face on one hand. The candlelight breathed gently along her neck and collar, and the flame caught the darkness in her eyes. She thought about how much older Kaiba looked and how he wasn't using the right shade of concealer to cover the dark circles under his eyes. 'It feels like so long since I saw you.'

'I saw you before the finals. You were unconscious.'

Mai wondered if this was how Kaiba always spoke to people, if the corporate meetings high up in that tower were comprised of these awkward, prideful interjections. He reminded her of celebrities she had met when touring Hollywood, the peak of the A-list who no longer knew how to treat people like human beings. They'd just forgotten how. She kept her five-star smile hitched high.

'So. What occasion caused you to summon me here like this? Business or pleasure?'

'Business.'

Mai winked at him. 'And here I thought it might be a romantic proposition.'

Kaiba seemed unsure if this was a joke. 'No. Of course not.'

The waiter appeared, uncalled, bringing a strawberry daiquiri and a whiskey. Mai accepted the daiquiri and wondered if Kaiba had, before her arrival, inputted _Kujaku Mai alcohol_ into his phone and brought up an interview she'd done two months ago for _Heart/Club_ magazine.

' _And what's your favourite food? Your favourite drink?'_

 _Kujaku Mai puts a perfectly manicured finger to her chin in contemplation._

' _Matcha buttercream cake, and strawberry daiquiris.'_

She preferred dry vodka, always had, ever since she'd got her first fake ID and started working for the casino cruise at age fifteen. But her publicist had advised against that answer. _'You're going to be thirty soon,' he had told her through a haze of smoke. 'Act like you're 22 as long as you can get away with it, because the moment you can't, your career is over.'_

Mai chased the slice of lemon around the rim of the glass. She needed a new publicist. She looked over at Kaiba, cradling his whiskey and looking at it with cool apathy, and she wondered if that was the drink he would have ordered if he were alone.

Jounouchi had once ordered absinthe to try to impress her. He'd thrown up on her car's cream leather interior. She didn't have the heart to tell him absinthe wasn't even a "guy" drink.

'I apologise if I misled you,' Kaiba said after a few moments, though there was no sincerity to his voice. 'I have a legal issue to settle.'

'Oh?' Mai wondered if someone was belatedly suing him over the lack of Battle City safety regulations. She could get in on that suit. The publicity would be useful, and she could always use the extra cash. She wondered if she should give modelling another shot.

 _Focus._

Mai shook herself and smiled her best, camera-happy smile. 'Do tell, then.'

Kaiba sipped once from the whiskey, frowned, sipped again, cleared his throat, then extracted his phone from his breast pocket. He hit some buttons and then pushed it across the table. Mai read the screen with polite curiosity.

 _Jounouchi Katsuya_

 _Hey asshole. If you find a spare moment when you're not reliving murdering your dad, could you let me know how many women you made fuck you in order to duel in BC? Aside from Kujaku I mean._

Mai leaned back. 'Is that it?'

'Yes.' Kaiba retrieved the phone. 'I apologise for the vulgarity.'

Mai watched him with careful, bright eyes. 'Kaiba, did you call me out here because Jounouchi sent you a mean text about me?'

'It's libel. It accuses you and me of illegal contact. We're both implicated.' Kaiba's upper lip curled back in a small, mad snarl. 'I contacted my lawyers, of course. They'll want to meet with you. I thought it would be prudent if we met in a more civil arena first. It would be useful to me to know how you wish to proceed.'

Mai inhaled once, then let her shoulders slump. 'Oh, Kaiba.' She felt a painful little bubble of laughter go through her. 'Sweetie, is this the first time someone has sent you something like this? It can't be, come on.'

Kaiba was too caught off guard to hide his indignation. 'It's libel, Kujaku. Jounouchi might be a bottom-feeder duellist, but his name still commands recognition in some circles. I will not allow this kind of disrespect. It's professionally damaging.'

Mai drained her drink, snapped her fingers, and was brought another. She was still the kind of person who could do that. 'Kaiba, honey, it's a text. Do you know how many messages like this I get every day? How many men accuse me of fucking my way into professional duelling? If I tried to prosecute every one of those I'd never do anything else. I can't believe this is the first time this has happened to you.'

'It's not. But…' Kaiba breathed out once, hard. His right forefinger was tapping on the table like a drowning fly. 'This is unacceptable from Jounouchi.'

'I see.' Mai hoped that they would be eating dinner, and she hoped that Kaiba intended to pay for it. God, she was so fucking sick of salads and spinach and under-300-calorie breakfast smoothies. 'So you called me here to complain about Jounouchi. That makes more sense.'

'Do you not think this is serious?'

'No, no I don't. Besides, I already knew about this. Jounouchi phoned me yesterday.'

'He did? What did he say?' There was an edge of anger and unashamed curiosity in his voice.

'About the same as the contents of the text.' She smiled, the smile of someone whose flowers were full of aphids. 'He asked if I had slept with you to get into Battle City.' Kaiba's eyes widened. He looked terrified. Mai laughed. 'He also called me a bitch.'

'That's despicable.'

'Oh, Kaiba. I get called a bitch a dozen times a day. You have to not care about these things.' Her hand went to her €1,000 Parisian purse and she removed her phone. She hit some keys. 'Look, here is what you get if you search for our names on duelling comment sites.' Her eyebrows twitched as she read. 'This one. "Kujaku was a prostitute to Crawford and then Kaiba. Women duellists are a joke." Then someone replies, "Kujaku must have a fetish for converting faggots."' She hit some more buttons. 'This thread speculates about whether or not I'm actually a man and if you're a lesbian.' She replaced the phone. 'Who cares what these idiots think?'

Kaiba's mouth was a thin, pale line. 'I expect better of professional duellists.'

'Is Jounouchi even ranked any more?'

'Seven hundred and twenty eighth worldwide,' said Kaiba instantly.

'Of course. And that is nothing. Irrelevant.' She smiled, sad and soft. 'He's just a dumb kid. Don't worry about him.'

Kaiba still wasn't looking at her. His attention was fixed on something distant and elsewhere.

'Have you spoken to Yuugi lately?'

'No. Not for years.'

'I see.' And he stood, with such abruptness Mai briefly wondered if a shot or an alarm had gone off somewhere. 'Thank you for your time. They will bill my account for the drinks.'

'That's it, then,' said Mai. It wasn't a question. Kaiba lingered at the table for a moment, his eyes once again looking elsewhere, looking at someone or something that was either yet to come or had long since left. 'Kaiba, I mean it. Don't worry about Jounouchi. Move on.'

He didn't even bother to answer her. He left, and Mai watched him leave, and then Mai ordered a quadruple vodka on Kaiba's dime and tried to take her own advice.

* * *

The cafe was full of bodies and voices, and the black coffee between his palms was growing cold. Jounouchi picked up a third packet of sugar and chewed on its serrated edge, feeling the paper stiffness give way to damp, and then he chewed it open and emptied it into the cup. It dissolved smoothly. He tried to catalogue his headache: hangover, caffeine withdrawal, stress, maybe sickness. The coffee would help, but he let it grow more and more tepid. Someone nearby was talking about his wife, whom he hated, and someone else was talking about a dog that had died next to his apartment block, and someone else was speaking Mandarin. The noise was warm like sand around him. His gums hurt.

Last night's party had been bad. Ambulance for one of the women. He didn't know her name. It could have been the coke or it could have been something else she took. It could have been anything. She had looked so strange, unconscious, her mouth open in an ugly, blurry way that you never saw when beautiful women passed out in the movies.

His phone was black and silent on the table beside him. Mai had not acknowledged the voicemail. Kaiba had not replied. He had heard nothing from either of them, from anyone, in a week.

He was a fuck up. He'd known that a long time. His dad would say it a lot, and it wasn't true, not for the reasons the man said, but yet it really was true. He fucked up everything. He hadn't wanted to hurt Mai (but he _had_ wanted to, he had wanted it so much) and he had wanted to hurt Kaiba, and now it was all fucked. He should have kept his mouth shut and put his fist through Kaiba's face.

'Fucking shit,' he whispered to himself, then flicked through his phone to Takeda's number. He wanted reassurance. He wanted absolution.

 _Woman taken to hospital last night. Possible OD. What do I do?_

At ten AM on a Monday, Jounouchi didn't expect to get an answer. He hadn't slept himself, and Takeda slept only odd hours; he lived off smoke and the sallow meat on his woodwormed bones. But the reply was immediate.

 _nothing. business as usual. see you later_

This wasn't, Jounouchi knew, the correct answer.

He thought about who else he could call. There was no one he could bother with something like this. Yuugi would be horrified, would look at him with fear and pity at what he had maybe done. Honda wouldn't get involved. He would look at his baby girl, that unblemished perfect creature, and know that Jounouchi's life in all its miseries was something he had to keep far away from her.

For the briefest of moments, Jounouchi wanted to call his mother. She would probably hang up on him. He didn't even know her current number.

He could go back to Kaiba. God, the thought sickened him. Just go crawling back and say _Hey, loser, guess what? I'm just as pathetic and useless as you are. I might have killed a woman! Didn't you used to make weapons? Maybe if I sell a few more kilos I can start to catch up to your death toll!_

He wondered if Kaiba would answer if he called. He had ignored the text, why would he want to have any further contact with Jounouchi? Not that Jounouchi wanted any further contact with _him_. Not that Jounouchi could ever be that desperate for the parody of friendly interaction.

He looked to the bleary, unnecessary plastic clock face on the cafe wall. He could go back to his apartment, sleep for six hours, then head out again to meet Takeda and drop off the cash. And the coke he hadn't managed to sell. How much was left? Too much, probably. He'd bailed before the ambulance arrived.

Had someone even called an ambulance?

They must have, if she was rich. They didn't let rich people die of overdoses anymore. That would be unfashionable. But maybe she wasn't rich. It hadn't been a nanbawan party, it was just a gathering of some mid-to-upper level salarymen. What if she was a hooker? They would have dumped her off the docks. It was dark down there under the water, and so quiet, he remembered.

He tried to drag his thoughts back to work. If he could just stop thinking about her open mouth. Slack, sagging, like his dad's had been when he ODed, lying there on the bathroom floor. His dad had drooled up spittle all over his chin and through his five-day stubble.

Work. How much was left in the bag? He swirled the coffee around his hands and considered. He had managed to unload maybe half of it. This party hadn't been the pay-in-advance kind, he had charged by the transaction. He was definitely short.

Jounouchi gulped down the cold coffee and pushed through to the shitty cafe bathroom. People threw him dirty looks, but he had long grown used to that. He locked himself in the stall, kicked down the toilet lid, sat, and pulled out two parcels: the envelope of cash in his left pocket and the plastic bag in his right. He rifled through the cash. A little over three hundred thousand. Way short. He definitely didn't have the money to bring it up to the round five he needed.

There was no way he could sell ¥200,000 of coke in eight hours without a lead. Impossible. He didn't know anyone who could even afford a gram. If he hit up all the places he knew, then maybe he could unload ¥50,000. If he got lucky. That still put him hopelessly short. Maybe Takeda would let it slide, just this once.

Jounouchi massaged the fine white stuff through the film. If he did it all at once, it would probably be a quick death. Better he took it than he tried to sell it to the street kids that slunk around his old haunts. Better for everyone.

Jounouchi raked his hand through his hair. Those were three bad options. Turn up to Takeda short, sell as much as he could in the next few hours, or just kill himself right here.

 _You're not going to kill yourself. Don't be a fucking idiot. You're too much of a coward anyway._

He pushed the thought away. He needed to find some other way to sell it, or otherwise to come up with the 200k. If only he hadn't spent most of the cash from selling Kaiba's TV. There was some left, maybe one hundred if he was lucky, so if he sold fifty's worth—

 _Just sell the coke to Kaiba._

That wasn't so much _two birds, one stone_ but rather a whole fucking flock with one pebble. He'd have the money, Kaiba would be high and happy and maybe dead, he'd still have a job, Takeda would stop whining to him about trying to get a hook up with Kaiba...

Yuugi would look at him with such piteous sadness for doing something like that. But Yuugi wasn't around any more. Yuugi didn't matter.

Jounouchi's head pounded like gravel in a tin can.

He did one line, unlocked the stall, stared at the eyes of his reflection like it was somebody else, then left the cafe and aimed to pavement-pound the four miles to the business district. He would go right up to the Kaiba Corp. desk. He would demand to see him. He wouldn't make up excuses, he wouldn't lie, he would simply be Jounouchi Katsuya — _the_ Jounouchi Katsuya, Battle City finalist! — and they would let him up. He could make it. He was no one's stray dog. He could do anything.

* * *

'Is Kaiba in?'

The receptionist regarded him with disinterested eyes. 'Excuse me?'

Jounouchi tapped his finger rapidly on the table.'Kaiba Seto. The CEO. Is he in?'

The receptionist leaned slowly back from the desk, putting a couple more inches between him and Jounouchi. He had a sardonic, bored face, as though Jounouchi's existence were an affront to him. Another receptionist beside him glanced up from her computer, eavesdropping with a total lack of stealth.

'I cannot disclose that information.'

'Just fucking tell me if he's in.'

The first receptionist's eyebrows twitched. The second bit her lip. Jounouchi met her eyes steady and hard. She wasn't great-looking, kind of buck-toothed. She could have been halfway to cute if she put any effort into her hair and make-up. Her lipstick was a stupid shade of pink, the kind dumb schoolgirls pick out when they want to look grown up.

The first receptionist picked up the phone. 'Would you like me to call security, sir?'

Jounouchi wanted to spit. 'Call _him_. Call Kaiba, tell him Jounouchi is in the lobby. _Jounouchi_. He wants to see me.'

'You have an appointment?' The scepticism was like a clarion bell ringing from the man's mouth.

'No, I don't have an appointment. But he will want to see me. I have something for him.'

The receptionist hit a key on the phone-pad. 'I am calling security now.'

'God damn, can you just call Kaiba? Do you not have clearance for that or something?'

'Ah—' The female receptionist tried weakly to get her colleague's attention. 'Kishitani-san, I think that's Jounouchi Katsuya. The duellist, you know.'

Jounouchi looked at her with surprise. It had been some time since someone recognised him for his stale duelling fame. He supposed hearing his name must have helped. He tried to beat down the coke-angry hammering of his heart and smiled in a way that might have once come across as winsome. Those smiles had unlocked doors for him when he was a kid, all bright and puppy dog-ish, but now he felt the grin spread across his lips and thought he must look just like Takeda. Just like a leering old man.

'That's me, the one and only.'

He became suddenly aware of two men in heavy suits behind him. Maybe it was the boredom or maybe it was the coke or maybe it was the high of being recognised by an almost-cute-girl, but they instilled in him no anxiety.

'Hold on,' said the receptionist. He took his colleague by the arm and led her aside, and the two spoke quietly to one another. Jounouchi could tell by the way he gripped her arm that he was her superior and that he didn't respect her, and that he probably grabbed a lot of girls like that. He sort of wanted to hit the guy. You didn't just grab girls and drag them around. He had never done that to Mai. She had slapped him, once. It hadn't hurt. He was sure he had deserved it.

The two receptionists came back over. Jounouchi smiled again at the girl and she looked away blushing. He felt almost warm inside at that. The first receptionist picked up the phone and dialled something.

'There is a young man claiming to be a _Jounouchi Katsuya_ in the lobby requesting an immediate appointment with Kaiba-sama.'

Jounouchi couldn't hear what was said at the other end of the line. The receptionist didn't say anything further to the person on the other end, but he listened for what must have been a full minute. Jounouchi amused himself by looking at the girl. She had a name-tag but it was obscured by her hair. Her breasts were big and full beneath the cheap white business shirt. He should say something cool and witty about not being able to read her name tag, but he couldn't think of anything, even with the coke.

The receptionist hung up. 'One moment, sir.' He looked to the two security guards. 'It's alright, gentlemen. Thank you for coming.'

Jounouchi and the receptionists stood in silence for another long time. Gracelessly, Jounouchi leaned on the counter, the dirty folds of his jacket getting grease on some stupid paperwork that lay on top. He looked at the girl. 'So you're into duel monsters?'

She blushed again and avoided his eyes. It was an ugly kind of shyness. 'Ah, only a little. I watched the Kaiba Corporation tournaments.'

'I did okay in those,' he said with mock humility. 'You play at all yourself?'

'Oh no. I'd be no good. It's too complicated.'

'Eh, nonsense. I'm sure you'd learn in no time. I could teach you.' God, these were some bad lines. The male receptionist stood between them with an expression like he could smell something foul. The girl giggled. Jounouchi started to feel sort of bad for her, and then he felt bad for himself. This was embarrassing.

He was saved from further self-flagellation by a sudden, impossibly deep voice behind him.

'Here to collect.'

Jounouchi jumped, startled. Beside him stood a massive man, three hundred pounds of muscle in a bespoke charcoal suit. His hair was long and glossy black, tied in a topknot, and his huge face wore a thick, expensively-styled beard. He looked down at Jounouchi from about two feet of height above him.

'Jounouchi Katsuya. Good to see you again. Let's get moving.'

Jounouchi couldn't place him. He was sure he hadn't met the man before, but when the man started walking towards the elevators he half-jogged to keep up. They skirted the regular elevators, opening and closing constantly as employees were whisked up the metal spine of KaibaCorp., and stopped at a flat metal panel Jounouchi hadn't even identified as an elevator at first. It had no buttons. The huge man swiped a card through a reader beside it and the doors slid open. They entered. The lights in here were dim, the walls suede, the carpet thick. As the doors closed silence settled around them. This elevator was perfectly soundproofed.

Jounouchi continued to stare at the man without really being aware that he was doing so. Inside the quiet of the elevator, the man seemed even bigger somehow.

'You were outside Kaiba-sama's car,' the man explained, sensing Jounouchi's confusion. 'At the hotel. Few weeks ago. I was driving. You grabbed the car door and I was going to break your fingers.' He said this brightly, conversationally, not with any intent to intimidate.

Jounouchi's brain felt like it was rolling around his skull. How high was he? Who was this man?

And then it came to him. Kaiba's chauffeur. The name escaped him.

'Kaoru,' the man supplied as though reading his mind again. 'Gotta say, I don't see a lot of people speak to Kaiba-sama the way you did. I've been working for him for about five years now and I've never seen you before, so I doubt you guys are good friends.' He wiggled his eyebrows. 'You wanting a revenge match against him or something? I guess you were a duellist back in the day.'

Jounouchi finally found his voice. 'Ah, something like that. We were in high school together.'

'Oh yeah?' Kaoru chuckled, shook his head, looked to the ceiling. His voice was thick dark syrup. 'Kaiba-sama in school. That must have been a scream.'

The elevator chimed softly, then the doors opened. They were in a bright white corridor with a single desk. There was a waiting area and a single big green plastic plant, but it was otherwise a totally sparse space. There were no windows.

They approached the desk. It was manned by a receptionist who was probably paid a lot more than the ones they had met in the lobby. This man was, Jounouchi guessed, west Asian and wore a striking dark green blazer with velvet lapels. He looked Jounouchi over with a countenance of mild assessment, then looked to Kaoru, sharing some private information with his gaze.

'One Jounouchi Katsuya,' Kaoru announced. The receptionist looked at Jounouchi again, thoughtfully. He then pressed a button on the desk with unusual delicacy. His fingernails were strikingly manicured,

'Jounouchi Katsuya to see you.' His voice was soft.

'Send him in.' Kaiba's voice came tinny out of the desk speaker.

The receptionist nodded towards the pale double doors beside him. 'Go right in.' There was something strange in his expression, though Jounouchi had no idea what it was. Something hostile. The hostility of this receptionist and the amusement of Kaoru chimed together somehow, but he had no idea why or what it meant.

Jounouchi pushed open the doors.

The office was familiar. He had seen it before in magazines, news segments, articles on the internet. Most of Kaiba's press interaction was given here, as though he couldn't be bothered any more to travel to meet journalists. The room was white, empty, sterile. White carpets, a white desk, white handle-less doors and panels lining the walls in which Jounouchi assumed paperwork had to be kept, because there was no other evidence of it. One large off-white corner sofa in suede sat in the middle of the room. One wall was floor-to-ceiling windows and Jounouchi could distantly glimpse ocean shimmers. They were eighty-something floors up. Kind of beautiful, kind of terrifying.

And there was Kaiba. He sat with his back to the windows, typing at a slim laptop, not looking up. He wore a steel blue blazer and white shirt, though no tie. Today, in this professional environment, he looked stunningly unremarkable. He could have been any other well-to-do young salaryman.

'I assume you've come to apologise.' Kaiba typed some more. Jounouchi wondered how much of his attention was truly absorbed by the computer screen and how much of it was pretense.

Jounouchi did want to apologise. Not to Kaiba — God, who could possibly care — but to Mai. She deserved so much better than him. If that bridge hadn't been burned already, he'd well and truly turned it to ashes now. It was over. Mai was just a beautiful ghost to him now, waving from far away, shrinking over some horizon.

 _Over over over_...

But Kaiba wasn't done with him. The girl he loved so much it made his teeth hurt moved through her life without thought or memory of him, but Kaiba was still here.

Jounouchi wedged his hands into his pockets. If he said sorry, maybe they could start fresh. Maybe they could talk like friends, or at least polite acquaintances. Maybe he could sell Kaiba the coke and go back to Takeda heavy for the week. Maybe Kaiba would kill himself and Yuugi would find out what happened and the pity would fill his eyes like sweet rice wine...

 _No_.

'No, I'm not here to apologise. Why would you think a dumb thing like that?' He forced a snort of fake laughter out of himself. 'Thought I'd come by to pick up an apology from _you_ for how you spoke to me the other day.'

Kaiba paused his typing. He looked at Jounouchi as though there were something faint about him, as though Kaiba's eyes couldn't quite focus. Then a clarity snapped into place.

'Don't be absurd. Get out of my office if that's what you're here for.'

Kaiba resumed his typing. But he didn't call security. Jounouchi waited for Kaiba to raise his hand, flick that button under his desk, turn back to his work as though none of it mattered to him at all — but he didn't. Kaiba typed, and Jounouchi stood and watched, and Kaiba typed, and the cocaine edge dulled and Jounouchi realised almost a full minute had passed and nothing had happened. The silence was a dare: _do something, do something before I call them, do it, do it!_

But Jounouchi did nothing, and nothing happened. Kaiba typed, he occasionally paused and clicked the mouse, then he typed some more. The silence lazily unwound like a cat and began gently padding around the room.

 _Chicken._

They used to play that, he and Honda, when they were kids. Run out into the road when a car was coming, whoever ran back first was the loser. The asphalt always smelled strong, the sunlight glinted off the broken glass, the drivers would yell _you dumb fucking kids_ or _get out of the way, god!_ or sometimes worse things. Wait until the car almost hit you, then run back to the pavement. Whoever did the sensible thing lost the game.

God, how Kaiba liked his games.

 _Yeah, okay. Let's play._

Jounouchi went to the couch and threw himself down on it. He let his shoes with their rubber filth soles and stepped-in-gum rest on the virgin suede. He heard Kaiba pause in his typing, but perhaps he was only pausing to read something.

Staring up at the ceiling, Jounouchi took notice of the overhead lights. They were a harsh white, not the dim yellows of the diners and shitty apartments and bars he knew so well. This is what it was to be rich. You were lit differently. The cuts on your skin cast different shadows.

Jounouchi closed his eyes to block out the light. He had been awake almost twenty-four hours. Not unusual for him. Not so unusual. Not so difficult. He couldn't sleep in his apartment anyway with the noise.

The typing continued.

Jounouchi had been so good at winning chicken. Honda always bailed at the last second. Once a car had hit Jounouchi, just grazed him, and it had hurt a bit but not really, and he could hear the engine drilling away the way he could hear Kaiba's typing, or the way the rain used to sound on the ceiling when he slept at Yuugi's, when they stayed up all night, years ago in middle school, and Jounouchi always had homework he hadn't done...

Jounouchi woke with a jolt.

'I said I'm leaving now.' Kaiba stood above him, looming, looking down, his eyes flat. 'It's late. I'm going home. You need to leave as well.'

Jounouchi blinked. 'Whatthefuck?' he slurred. He swallowed. The lights above him burned his eyes. Outside, the sun had set. The day had disappeared in an instant. 'Kaiba?'

'Get out of my office.' Kaiba said this without reproach. He was probably used to people doing exactly what he wanted as soon as, or even before, he said it.

Jounouchi stared up at that weird blank face. 'Chicken.' The word came to him from far away, washed up on the shore of his consciousness.

Kaiba stared down at him. 'What?'

'You lost the game.' Jounouchi rubbed his eyes. God, he needed coffee. He flicked on his phone and saw, with no surprise, eleven missed calls from Takeda. Jounouchi ground his fingers into his eyelids until he saw stars. 'Dammit. I'm sorry about the text. I'm really fucking sorry.' Kaiba said nothing. The apology wasn't for Kaiba, it was for Mai. But she wasn't here. She would never be near him again. He'd never smell her pink champagne smell again. Instead he had Kaiba. 'Dammit,' he said again. 'I think a woman might have died last night. Overdose.' He kept rubbing eyes longer than he needed to so to avoid meeting Kaiba's gaze, but eventually he had to look up. There was no judgment in Kaiba's face. If this news surprised or shocked him, there was no indication.

'You dealt to her?'

'Yeah. Maybe. I don't know if I should get a lawyer.'

'Can you afford a lawyer?' The question was an insult, a joke. The familiarity of such insults was weirdly comforting.

'Nope.' He let his arms drop to his sides. The sleep had helped. He felt a little more whole. Takeda and money and his rent felt very far away right now. 'You could hire one for me.'

'Why on earth would I do that?'

Jounouchi shrugged. 'You could do it out of the kindness of your heart.'

Kaiba seemed unsure if this was a joke.

'Forget about it.' Jounouchi tried to sit up, then thought better of it. 'Fuck. It wasn't a coke overdose, I didn't sell her that much. And she was fine, before... You know, before. So it must have been something else. Maybe a speedball. Or it could be the coke was cut with something poisonous.'

Kaiba's expression was impossible to read. There might have been, somewhere deep in there, some grain of curiosity.

'Do you have some on you?'

'Of course I don't—' Jounouchi began. _Of course I don't have any on me. How stupid do you think I am?_ And then he felt the weight in his pocket. He hadn't even been home. He hadn't changed his clothes. He had hiked around Domino with thirty grams of cocaine in his jacket pocket. He breathed out once, slowly. 'Yeah, I do.'

'I can test it.' Kaiba held out his hand.

'Why would you do that?'

'You sold to my associate and you tried to sell to me. If you've been selling coke cut with rat poison to people in my professional circle, then I would like to know about it.' Kaiba said this levelly, but it hit Jounouchi's ears with a metallic screech of inauthenticity. He filed that thought away.

'And if it is cut with something bad?'

'I'll call the police.'

Jounouchi considered. 'Not much motivation for me to let you to test it, then.'

'You get peace of mind.' The slightest hint of a frown crossed Kaiba's brow, and once again it seemed he was distracted by something not in the room with them. 'That's what you're looking for, yes?'

Jounouchi sighed: long, low, like if he could just breathe out deep enough and long enough he could exhale all the shit and shame he had been carrying around inside him for the past so many years.

He handed Kaiba the bag, and Kaiba took it.


	5. Home Is Where I Want to Be

The laboratory was another bleached room. White tiles, steel tables, white-seated steel stools. It was windowless and huge, low-ceilinged, crammed with projects either sleeping or abandoned. One table over-spilled with wires and circuit boards, another housed a scale model of a plane with wings like the Blue Eyes, another was coated in blueprints. On the other side of the room were chemical projects: messes of tubes, beakers, microscopes, weird heavy machines whose purpose was alien to Jounouchi. He stopped to examine the model plane and twanged its plastic tail fin. It echoed loud and satisfying in the long room. He did it again.

'Everything in here is confidential,' said Kaiba. He was already halfway to a desk. 'I would have you sign an NDA but it's not as if you have any idea what you're looking at.'

Jounouchi realised he had bent the tail fin and tried to bend it back. 'I know this plane is probably made of shitty mid range polyethylene instead of some decent polypropylene.'

Kaiba looked over, surprised, and then washed the expression away and seated himself at the desk. 'The material with which we make our concept models is hardly high stakes information.'

'It still makes it look like you have low standards for your products.' The fin snapped off. Jounouchi shrugged and balanced it awkwardly atop the plane's body.

'Try not to break anything else while I'm working.' Kaiba was busying himself doing something complicated and boring with a pipette, slides, small beakers, and a microscope. Jounouchi glanced about for something to do. The whole room looked like a rocket ship and he felt so much like he had wandered abruptly into a science fiction film that he could almost forget why he was here.

'Hey Kaiba, what's your WiFi password?'

Kaiba did not look up from the microscope. 'kc793gpo190, no capitals.'

'Wow, that's real catchy and memorable.' Jounouchi swivelled on his stool as he input the characters. He glanced up at Kaiba, back to his phone, and then on a whim searched _wiki kaiba seto_. 'You ever read your wikipedia article, Kaiba?'

There was a pause that suggested Kaiba was far more engrossed in putting small amounts of cocaine onto slides than he ever could be in Jounouchi. 'No.'

Jounouchi began to skim read. ' _Kaiba Seto is a Japanese business magnate, entrepreneur, and humanitarian. He is the CEO of Kaiba Corporation and its subsidiary bodies. Forbes magazine estimated his net worth as...'_ Jounouchi indulged in a false, exaggerated yawn that only he was party to and scrolled down. ' _Early life. Kaiba was adopted at age ten, along with his younger brother Kaiba Mokuba, by then-CEO of Kaiba Corporation, Kaiba Gozaburo.'_ The name was highlighted as a link.

"Kaiba Gozaburo" didn't mean a great deal to Jounouchi. He thought back to what Sugata had said about CEOs committing suicide. That was what had happened to Kaiba Gozaburo, right? Just before they first got to know Kaiba. There was a weird contradiction, Jounouchi felt, between one's social tie to the parent of a schoolmate and to a corporate celebrity. Like most kids, Jounouchi didn't know much about his classmates' parents outside of those of his immediate circle. He knew Yuugi's mother and Honda's family, but not Anzu's because she had never invited them to her house. _No boys allowed_ , came the phantom rule of a mother he'd never met. He had imagined Anzu Sr as a strict, prim woman in grey cardigans and ankle-length skirts, a small silver Christian cross in the hollow of her throat. What did Kaiba Gozaburo mean to him?

The guy had to be an asshole, that much was certain. Mokuba and Seto had both made little secret of their dislike of him. Jounouchi felt his way around the associations he had with the name. Some rich powerful old asshole in a suit. In his mind he gave the ghost parent small round glasses and cutting cheek bones, a thin body in a grey pinstripe suit, a black tie tight beneath the chin. The conjuration was somewhere between a dentist and a vampire. This seemed right. Someone kind of like Kaiba, but older and grey and sallow and emptier. The fragments of his imagination continually flashed silver as though someone were holding a scalpel.

Jounouchi clicked the link.

The photo was sort of what he expected, sort of not. It was a publicity still. The man was posed serenely in an oxblood leather chair, his legs crossed, his expression mild. He wasn't the kind of man who smiled for photos, Jounouchi could tell; this mildness was the best it would get. The broadness of his jaw and shoulders advertised authority, and the cut of his sideburns and moustache spoke of the deliberate cultivation of that aesthetic. The man was built solid and cold, like a prison. He was no Takeda.

Out of some strange childish idleness, Jounouchi wondered what it would be like to see this man and his own father fight it out. His dad had brawled plenty and this man probably spent his days sedentary and bored, but Jounouchi still knew - with a strange twinge of embarrassment - that his dad would get knocked down into the dirt. When his dad beat up on him in the later years, Jounouchi let him do it out of embarrassment more than anything else. He could have stopped him. It didn't hurt any more. But that was all the power his dad had in the world, it seemed, and Jounouchi had had so much pity for him in those last few years when he started to lose his teeth and would piss himself in public...

He shook off this train of thought. It was stupid. He wasn't a kid any more. He looked up to Kaiba, feeling oddly guilty for entertaining those thoughts and wondering if Kaiba could somehow tell, but he seemed totally immersed whatever was on the other end of the microscope.

Jounouchi looked back to the screen. The link glowed, tempting him with knowledge that Kaiba probably didn't want him to have. Jounouchi pressed it.

The article was long. _1\. Early life 2. Military career 2.1 Rise 2.2. September coup 2.3. Controversy 3. Life in China 4. Kaiba Corporation..._ and so 's eyes glazed over all the sub-headings beneath that one, some of them comprehensible ( _Founding_ , _International expansion_ ), others less so ( _Gulf war profiteering_ , _Accusations of insider trading_ ). He scrolled aimlessly until he reached _Death_.

The paragraph was short and heavily referenced.

 _On August 23rd, Kaiba jumped from the 78th floor of the Kaiba Corporation headquarters. There were eleven witnesses, including the then-fifteen-year-old Kaiba Seto. The death was ruled a suicide. The head of Kaiba Corporation's legal department, Ouka Chikuzen, said of the incident, 'It was sudden to us, but I think it was a decision he made before entering that room. He always had a flair for the dramatic.' Kaiba Seto has never spoken publicly about the events of his father's death._

'It's pure.'

Jounouchi looked up. Kaiba was folding the microscope back into itself.

'It's not cut with anything? Nothing at all? Not even baby powder or something?'

'Nothing. Your source is apparently a good one.'

'God.' Jounouchi raked his hands through his hair. He felt both better and worse. So he wasn't responsible. A woman might still be dead. He hated himself for the bits of relief that floated through him. 'I hate ODs. I hate people doing that to themselves.'

Kaiba said nothing to this. Jounouchi took a breath.

'I never dealt meth, okay? Do you believe me?'

'That's how your father died,' said Kaiba neutrally, as though they were discussing the weather.

Jounouchi wondered if Kaiba somehow knew what page he had just been reading. 'Yeah, and I didn't sell it to him. You think I'm the only dealer in Domino or something?'

At this, the mild jab at Kaiba's intelligence, he relented. He shrugged one shoulder. 'It was a reasonable assumption.'

'What, you think selling meth to your dad so he kills himself is a reasonable thing to do? You're so fucked, Kaiba.'

Kaiba's gaze remained steady and blank. And Jounouchi realised it wasn't meant to be a slight against him; it wasn't that Kaiba thought Jounouchi was some heartless asshole who wanted his own father dead, but that causing your own parent to OD probably wasn't all that out of left field for him. _Projecting._

'You overreact,' said Kaiba in that airy voice as though none of this was of any interest to him at all, as though he regularly invited high school acquaintances into his company laboratory to test cocaine. 'Methamphetamines are not so chemically different to cocaine. You needn't be so superior about them. Your moral condemnation of the former is more a result of cultural conditioning than chemistry.'

Again, Jounouchi rolled around the idea of punching Kaiba in the face. 'You're so fucking insufferable, Kaiba.'

'And you're uneducated, which I find insufferable. I would have thought you'd care at least enough about what you were selling to look it up on the internet.'

'Great.' Jounouchi rubbed his eyes. He felt like they were buried underground in here and it didn't matter if it was day or night. 'You're an asshole and I'm dumb. We've progressed so much since high school, huh?'

'The more things change.'

They stood for a moment, neither saying anything, neither wanting anything, the circumstances having once again reached their natural conclusion. Jounouchi should say thank you and good night and go home, and sleep, and probably never speak to him again. Kaiba should go home to Mokuba - _where was Mokuba?_ \- and they shouldn't speak to one another again. They had nothing in common. There was no incentive. They should go back to their lives.

'You got any alcohol around here?'

Kaiba looked at him with disgust. 'Don't you want to go home? It's two AM.'

'Don't _you_ want to go home?' Jounouchi retorted immediately, and he knew the answer for Kaiba was as cement a _no_ as it was from him. 'Besides, we never go to watch Yuugi's duel together. Don't you want my opinion on his play tactics?'

He hadn't said this expecting Kaiba to agree, it was more of a jibe at Kaiba's endless weird fixation on Yuugi and Duel Monsters, but Kaiba's response was immediate.

'Alright. Since you're here.' He headed suddenly for the door and Jounouchi scrambled to follow, feeling like Kaiba wasn't even fully aware of his presence as the door auto locked behind them. Kaiba's eyes went briefly to that _elsewhere_ to which they kept travelling. 'I suggest conference room C. It has the best A/V facilities. Follow the signs. I'll join you shortly.'

Jounouchi watched him leave. Everything was weird and nonsensical about the moments passing him by. 'And can I get a drink?'

'Yes, Jounouchi,' said Kaiba with exhausted indulgence.

Jounouchi pushed his luck like the arcade machines pushed yen coins off the ledge. 'And something to eat?' he called after him.

Kaiba turned, rolled his eyes, then tossed a keyring at Jounouchi, who failed to catch it. 'Stock cupboard two.'

* * *

'God, he just... he fucking loves Magical Hats, doesn't he?'

Jounouchi snorted into his glass of whiskey. The whiskey bottle had the image of a sailboat on the side and looked so expensive he could pay his rent with it. Kaiba hadn't objected to his choice, and nor had he objected when Jounouchi poured two glasses. In front of them, a projector threw massive images of Yuugi against the wall as he played against some nobody from a tournament years ago. Yuugi's huge, gentle eyes were set firm and the picture quality was wrinkled like silk.

'It's a predictable move.'

'Every time with the hats! Fucking... _magician_ themed deck.' Jounouchi's face scrunched in concentration. 'Hey Kaiba, Kaiba, if the magicians were magicians in Ancient Egypt, what type of magicians were they? Were they, like, priests or sorcerers or something? Like, what did it mean to be a magician?' His frown corkscrewed even further. 'Did like... did Pegasus base Magical Hats on some real Ancient Egyptian hats?'

'Please shut up. You're drunk.'

Jounouchi knew he was drunk. He had been hard drinking more nights than not this week, and he could feel his body hating him for it in a way it never used to when he was in high school. He was going to end up like his father. He was going to die alone in his own vomit. But Kaiba was drunk too. It was a different kind of drunk, very different. Kaiba was not a loquacious drunk. He spoke less and retreated further into himself, and his words came thick and unclear.

The opponent attacked Yuugi's hats, destroying an empty one.

'God! They never get the right one. What are the odds, huh?'

'Two thirds, you absolute moron.'

Jounouchi wagged his finger. 'Nah, look, it's two thirds the first time he plays it. But every time he plays the card, it gets a bit more. Eventually someone _has_ to get the right one.'

'That's not how probability-' Kaiba began, then cut himself off. He stared up at the massive image of Yuugi against the wall. The room flickered with electric light, blue and purple, and Kaiba's face looked like he was underwater.

'Hey man,' said Jounouchi, still thinking about the creation of the card, 'How well did you know Pegasus? Did you work with him before the whole... you know... child abduction thing?'

'Not well.' Kaiba drank a mouthful. 'I didn't like him even before he kidnapped my little brother.'

Jounouchi snorted. 'Go-o-od. What a massive queer.'

There was a brief silence that Jounouchi was too drunk to notice. 'He had a wife,' said Kaiba, his voice in slightly more control than before. 'She died.'

'Oh yeah, I know, but like... you know what I mean. Besides, it's not like getting married means you love your wife. Look at my parents.' He laughed once, short and ugly. 'Hey Kaiba, was your foster father married?'

'Jounouchi, if what comes out of your mouth isn't related to the duel, I don't want to hear it.'

'I'm just asking! God, why are you such an asshole all the time? My parents fucking hated each other. I get why. Like, I get why my mother hated my dad. He was fucking reprehensible. I'm glad he's dead. Are you glad your father is dead?'

Kaiba said nothing. He stared at Yuugi, the Yuugi who wasn't there. He clutched his whiskey with knuckles like glass shards.

'Anyway,' Jounouchi went on, 'You watched him kill himself, right? I read that. That must've been weird. Was it weird?' He didn't wait for an answer. He unscrewed the bottle for what must have been the dozenth time. He didn't feel sick, not yet, and he wanted to barrel on down this black, slick hole. 'I was the one who found my dad, after he died. I came home, and I was late because I'd worked until seven AM and then gone straight to my boss, and then I was on the way back, and I was too wired to sleep so I went to a cafe. I stayed there about an hour and then I went home. I went up the stairs, I unlocked the door, and I could... We had a really small apartment, right? So I could see him from the door. Just his feet, sticking out of the bathroom.' He drank to punctuate the memory. 'I knew he was dead, like, instantly. Or maybe that's retroactive. Confirmation bias. If it turned out he was just passed out, I wouldn't have known...' He cut himself off, ran a hand over his face. Kaiba wasn't watching Yuugi any more. He was watching Jounouchi, but his face was empty, ghoulish. 'Whatever. He was lying in the bathroom. He'd had a stroke. He'd taken all the meth I had and then drunk a half bottle of whiskey, and he'd had a stroke. His face was all fucked up. You know, loose on one side. Yeah. So I called 119 and they came and they took him away. I don't remember anything after finding him, to be honest. It's all just... I reconstruct it from what I know must have happened. I called them, they came, they must have spoken to me but I don't remember what they said.'

He shrugged, just to have something to do with his shoulders, then refilled his already-full glass. He let the whiskey spill over the table and the floor, just for the sake of wasting it. He didn't look up at Kaiba. 'So. Your dad jumped out a window, huh? What did the body look like after? Must've been grim.'

'What does it matter?' The response was too quick, like recoiling from an insect that meant you no harm.

'It doesn't. I guess. Or maybe it does to you. Maybe that's why you don't want to talk about it.'

'I don't wish to discuss the death of my foster father because it has no relevance to my life any more. I'm past that. I moved on.' His eyes flicked away, then back. 'It was over a decade ago. Your... _loss_... was more recent.' He said 'loss' like it was a foreign word he was liable to mispronounce. Like it wasn't a part of his vocabulary.

'What about your bio parents?'

He hadn't expected any kind of strong emotional response from Kaiba on that point. Kaiba showcased certain emotions - anger, pride, victory, horror - but Jounouchi was sure the delicate, orange-pulp inside of Kaiba's childhood feelings were buried and locked away somewhere he would never see. He was surprised at Kaiba's response: a sudden roll of his eyes, a violent shrug of his shoulder, a hissing exhale.

'We are not discussing this. This isn't group therapy. I am not here to share anything with you.'

'Then why are you here?'

Obsidian wrath curled Kaiba's lip. He pointed savagely to the projected images: Yuugi's victorious face, fading into the past; statistics that no longer mattered; cheering crowds long dispersed.

'For _this_. To learn. To improve. To understand.'

'Understand what?'

'The _game_ , you half-wit. Duel Monsters. That's what it's always about. That's...' There was a tremor to his voice, wavered by a sharper degree of intoxication than he had intended to hone. He steadied himself. 'You might not care anymore, Jounouchi, but I have not lost sight of what matters.'

The electric images hummed and its lights quavered. The nighttime traffic could just be heard winding around the buildings in the street below, like cats. Jounouchi looked through the huge windows. Yeah, he could understand why someone would want to throw themselves out of one of those. It would be funny to do it, just to see the look on Kaiba's face.

He stood. 'I'm going home.'

Right then, more than anything, he wanted Mai. He wanted to feel the way she had made him feel, all good and warm and important and loved. He was a selfish prick. She knew that, he knew that, his father knew it.

'Then go. You clearly have nothing of value to offer.'

Kaiba turned back to the screen. He picked up the remote and pressed some buttons, navigating to the next duel, to the next long forgotten victory, to the next triviality. Jounouchi couldn't be certain if he was only pretending to be engrossed in the duels, or if Kaiba had genuinely lost interest in him so quickly.

'You're an asshole.'

Kaiba laughed once, short and dry, and made no other reaction.

And Jounouchi left.

* * *

The corridor was a flat dead grey sea. He hated office buildings. He hated his apartment. He walked to the elevators and hit the button. The doors slid open immediately; nobody else was in the building to summon them. Inside the light was harsh and yellow, and Jounouchi considered the elevator and what lay beyond it: the lobby, the street, the subway, his shitty apartment, a night and a morning in that bed and then hoping for Takeda to call in the afternoon... Maybe he could steal a laptop on the way out and pawn it, get enough money for cigarettes...

The doors slid closed. Jounouchi took a hard left down the hall, then a right, then a left, and then he chose whatever doors and offices and corridors presented themselves to him at random. He navigated by blind chance.

And then, suddenly, there she was. He was at an open office door, and there she was. The receptionist from downstairs. Still here, at four in the morning, clutching some files and slotting them into a cabinet. What were the chances?

' _Two thirds, you absolute moron.'_

Nah. Close to zero, surely, that she'd still be here and by pure luck be on the same floor that he was. Impossible luck.

 _She stayed because she wanted to see you. She likes you._

What was her name? He couldn't read her name-tag from this distance. She was younger than him. Twenty, maybe. Her shirt didn't fit right, it was designed for someone a size smaller than her. The placket stretched unattractively, making these little open mouths between the buttons. From the right angle he would probably be able to see her bra.

He hooked his fingers into his belt loops and strolled into the room. He was full of alcohol and emptiness and wet tar. 'Still here?' He grinned his best puppy dog smile. She looked up, startled, then smiled. Her teeth were too big. She bowed to greet him.

'Jounouchi-san! I'm sorry, I didn't hear you come in. I was working late.'

Jounouchi stopped to rest against the filing cabinet, thinking of Mai, smelling this girl's cheap perfume. He wiggled his eyebrows at her. 'Kaiba doesn't let you home at a normal hour?'

'Oh, Kaiba-sama is very generous. We have very good employment benefits.' She said this like it was practised. 'I just like to work late. There's always a lot to do.' She smiled and clasped her hands in front of her.

Jounouchi wondered what would be the shortest number of exchanges they could have before he could get her to open his legs. He was too drunk. He used to have to beg for it from Mai, near the end. It made him hate himself. It made him hate her. There was nothing good inside him any more.

'You don't have a boyfriend to get back to?'

She looked down and smiled and blushed all at once.

 _She's too young,_ Jounouchi thought. She was like Shizuka. He pushed that thought from his mind. She had to be at least eighteen, and that was fine. Being eighteen didn't feel so very long ago. He remembered how bright the sun had been on summer lunch breaks at school and the dusty smell in the air.

'Ah, no. I... no, I mean, there's... I don't, no.'

Jounouchi smiled at her like he smiled for Takeda. And he told her how pretty she was, and he said it again, and she blushed a lot, and he said he'd love to take her out some time, and she agreed, and he said it was like they were on a date already, and the rest of it was all a pointless, boring blur until he had her on the desk, her skirt hiked up, and she was making these little high-pitched keening sounds into his ear that helped him stay hard, though he couldn't cum. Occasionally he looked at the security camera and he knew, just as he knew that his dad was dead from the first moment he opened the apartment door, that Kaiba was watching them.


	6. This Must Be the Place

'Did I do something wrong?'

The bathroom was fluorescent, almost but not quite like sunlight. Jounouchi studied the dirt under his fingernails as he washed them at the sink. He didn't wash them enough. Seemed like the kind of thing Kaiba would comment on. He was always too dirty.

He could feel her hovering by the door, hesitant to be in this male space, and he could see reflected the one hand playing with the dangling button on her blouse. That button, limp and useless, somehow made him in this moment feel worse about this girl than he ever had for Mai. God, at least Mai had her shit together. No one looked after Mai. Her clothes never fell apart.

He still had not answered. He turned off the tap and looked at the girl's reflection in the mirror above the sink.

'No, of course not.' He grinned. He looked possessed. 'Just had a long day. Sorry I wasn't better.'

'It's okay,' she said too quickly, too ready to comfort him, too ready to make everything alright. 'Maybe we rushed things a bit, huh?'

Jounouchi could smell her cheap perfume on his clothes. It made him feel sick. It wasn't her fault. He probably smelled like grave dirt.

'Yeah. Sorry. I should, uh…' He ran a hand through his hair. It was greasy. He could feel the long absence from his apartment, his shower. 'I should get home.'

'Where do you live?'

'Other side of downtown.'

'The smaller hiroba district? I live near there.' She looked hopeful. She looked like she thought this was the start of something new and exciting, and not just another disgusting, pointless conclusion. She was too young. She didn't understand. Jounouchi wanted to punch his face in the glass.

'Ah, right. I've got to…' He searched for an excuse. There wasn't one. He wondered, briefly, if he should bring her home. Or he could go to her place. He thought about waking up with her. She'd make him breakfast. They could go to the park. Next time Shizuka called, he could tell her he had been seeing someone, and no it wasn't _serious_ yet but he was seeing someone. _She works in the city. She's really sweet, Shizuka, you'd like her. We're going to get our own place, once I've saved up a bit more. We'll live on her salary until then. We'll get a little one-bed and there'll be room enough for a crib if we decide to have kids…_ And that would happen eventually. He'd drink too much and not be able to get a condom on, and she'd be too passive to object, and that's how that would happen. That would be how his life would happen.

'I've got to get home,' he said, his eyes avoiding those of her reflection. 'My girlfriend will be up soon.'

He saw the pain and shame and disgust crash though her face. It made him feel sick. _Welcome to my world._

'Oh. I'll… I'm sorry, I didn't… I didn't realise.' She waited for him to say something, or for her to think of something else to say, and there was nothing from either of them. And then she left.

Jounouchi stood in the bathroom, staring into the sink, for a good ten minutes until he was sure she wasn't coming back.

He would go home now. He would call Takeda and apologise and try to work something out. He would go back to his apartment and sleep for a bit, then do some of the coke in the morning, then—

Kaiba still had the coke.

Jounouchi swore and did, then, punch the mirror. It didn't crack and his knuckles didn't bleed, which was what was supposed to happen, and so this was another failure in the useless parade of failures that made up his life. He stared at the spot he'd punched. He didn't have the fire to do it again.

He had to get the coke back. There was ¥200,000 worth in that bag; he couldn't leave it here. That was his job on the line, that was next month's rent, food. His life. That's what the next day hinged on, and the day after that, and the day after that…

He retraced his steps with no idea which route he had taken. The place was a maze, every corridor identical the one before it, every empty office filled with the same chairs and the same desks and the same pot plants and the same KC branded corporate art. Stencil prints of dragons, macro photography of circuit boards, all of Kaiba's stupid bullshit he had slathered over his offices. He eventually found the conference room, only able to recognise it from the fact the projector screen was still pulled down and the table shone with whisky spills. Kaiba was gone.

Kaiba's office was the next step. He went out again, up and down more corridors, found one flight of stairs and climbed it and then found another and climbed down. Every wrong turn took him closer to sobriety, and that was the last place he wanted to end up. If he could just find those double doors, if he could just take the right turning…

His buzz had curdled into nausea by time he found his way back and it didn't even occur to him to knock. The doors pushed open easy and Jounouchi blinked for a moment at the open maw of the glass windows, the city crowding below, the distant sound of traffic and helicopters and far, far away people.

Kaiba was here. He was, bizarrely, printing something. He looked gaunt and weird and sick, pale against the abyssal black of the night sky beyond his office. He didn't look up when Jounouchi walked in.

'Forget your drugs?'

'Yeah. Unless you want to take them off me? I'll cut you a deal, 250k for the batch.'

'What would I do with that much cocaine?' His eyes were twitching over the print out.

'Maybe cut loose and have some fun for a change,' Jounouchi muttered to himself, but loud enough for Kaiba to hear. He rubbed the back of his neck and walked up to the chasmic city below. A million miles down. He felt Kaiba watching him, but when he turned back Kaiba's eyes were still on the printer. 'What are you printing at…' He glanced at the wall clock. 'Fucking six in the morning?'

'A notice of termination.'

Jounouchi snorted. 'Who the fuck managed to piss you off enough to get fired in the middle of the night?' But as soon as the words left his mouth he knew.

'Is your memory that poor? Have you forgotten her already?'

'Are you fucking kidding me, Kaiba? Jesus Christ, what the hell did she do?'

'She abandoned her post. And then she fucked you on a desk, which is company property.' The profanity sounded strange in Kaiba's mouth, a weird flower blooming in a patch of dry dirt.

'You're unbelievable, Kaiba. You really are. Just when I think you might not be absolutely, entirely the bitterest, saddest piece of shit I've ever met, you find a way to outdo yourself.'

'She was a poor secretary anyway.'

Seized with petulance, Jounouchi twisted Kaiba's words in his mouth and parroted them back. ' _"She was a poor secretary, suboptimal performance, immediate termination._ God, do you even know her name?'

Kaiba glanced up for the first time since he'd entered and watched him like a cool river. He spoke with a rich, indulgent disgust. 'Do you?'

Jounouchi opened his mouth, closed it. 'Ayako.'

'Wrong.' His eyes dropped again.

'Oh, fuck you. Who cares if she had sex at work? She's working way overtime; just dock her pay or something. You can't fire her, it was my fault anyway. Don't blame her for my shit.'

'Your fault? Was she not consenting?' Kaiba's voice was flat, like none of this mattered to him. 'If that's the case I can have my security team escort you to the police station.'

'Fuck you, of course she was consenting. She—'

'So she _is_ at fault. Thus my decision to terminate her contract is entirely justified.' He leaned against the desk, unreadable, eyes like lead. 'Either you raped her, or it's grounds for termination. Take your pick.'

Jounouchi wanted to kill him. He wanted his hands to swim in blood. 'God. Why are you like this? Why do you have to ruin people's lives for some petty vengeance?'

'I could ask you the same question.' Kaiba looked up at him and his face was totally blank. He took no pleasure in this. It didn't look like he took pleasure in anything. None of this meant anything to him, but he was going to do it anyway. He glanced over to the desk. 'Your bag is there. I suggest you take it and you don't come back.'

Jounouchi wanted to hit him. The urge uncoiled itself within him, whispering _fight fight fight_ in his ear like they used to do in the playground when he roughhoused with a bully twice his size. He wanted to ruin Kaiba's pretty face. But he didn't.

'Hey Kaiba,' he said, and he let the words pour out of him in a polluted sluice. 'Why are you still studying Yuugi? You know he wants nothing to do with you, right? He thinks you're pathetic and sad and weird. He doesn't even think about you any more. You're just some freak he went to high school with, and he's moved on. You're wasting your time with all these stats and late night study sessions. He's over you.'

'Fascinating opinion.' But Kaiba didn't meet his eyes. Even if Jounouchi had no idea of the veracity of his claims, even if he was just saying everything he worried Yuugi thought about him, it was still, really, probably true of Kaiba as well.

'You know I'm right. Where's Mokuba, anyway? Did he abandon you too?'

'Where's your sister?' countered Kaiba, his voice still empty, just going through the motions. There wasn't even disgust in there. 'Stopped taking your calls?'

'What is this, "I'm rubber you're glue"?'

'And your mother? I assume she didn't offer to take you in after you killed your father.'

'You _know_ I didn't kill him. Don't be so fucking obtuse. Just because you killed yours.'

This had no discernible effect on Kaiba. He was probably used to the accusations, or he genuinely didn't care, or maybe he _did_ murder the guy and he still took a kind of sick pleasure in being reminded of it. 'Your cowardice isn't charming. You're weak and pathetic. You always were.' There was the faintest ripple of genuine excited anger to Kaiba's words, like he was desperate to unleash that old fury and he'd forgotten quite how. But it wasn't thrilling any more. It was sad. He stood there and his chest heaved ever so lightly with his angry breaths, and it was just sad.

Jounouchi nested his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looked around him at Kaiba's office, seeing it again, seeing the barrenness of the space. The walls were bare, the desk was empty. The bone white sofa was faintly smudged in one space from his shoes. The room was cold and ghostly; the windows gaped out over the black skyscrapers, high office window lights, tiny people miles and miles away from him. He wondered if you could see his little scrap of downtown from here. He wondered what it looked like from above.

'I'm going home,' he said. 'I think we're done here.' He sounded tired and old in a way he didn't remember.

'Fine. Go.' Kaiba turned away and sat at his laptop, opening it up, probably pretending to work. Jounouchi watched him type. Kaiba would never be the one to turn back and to try again and to make things right; it wasn't in his nature. It wasn't in most people's.

'Okay. See you around.'

He had barely turned to leave when Kaiba spat out a laugh. '"See you around"? What, do you think I'm going to crawl to the other side of downtown and visit you in your vile apartment?'

Jounouchi was almost gone. He paused at the door. 'It's just an expression, Kaiba.' And he left.

Jounouchi's back hit his hard mattress with familiar discomfort as polluted sunlight dribbled through the blinds. He lay there, staring at the stains on the ceiling, the shadeless light bulb, the posters of bands he'd worshipped as a teenager who had long broken up. He rubbed his face as though he could rub away his skin and bare his skull. A hangover was edging its way into his brain, and he felt kind of hot and flu-like, with a swarm of anxiety lodged somewhere in his lower gut.

He checked his phone. Seven AM.

He would sleep. He would sleep and wake up and shower, and he'd feel better maybe. He would go out and make amends with Takeda and get a new job, and then he'd have something to do. Some sense of purpose. And then he could…

He never knew what came after that. Get a job, get paid, and then what?

Jounouchi pushed the thought from his mind by getting up to tweak the blinds, sinking the bedroom into a dim murkiness he could sleep through. He fell back to the bed and positioned the flat, lifeless pillow beneath his head. Things would look better in the morning.

But it was already morning.

* * *

Jounouchi slept, woke, slept again. Dreamed of a cave under the ground with skulls in it, walking with Bakura, and Bakura picked up a skull and said, _'You know, I used to know this one. He was a sculptor. Couldn't get it right, though, in the end.'_ Bakura handed him the skull, but in Jounouchi's hand it was a shiny apple, stolen from the lunch room at school, and he bit it and all his teeth fell out into the sugary flesh.

He woke, his heart slamming in his chest, his skin burning hot. He slept again. Dreamed of his father's corpse. Dreamed of turning the corner into the bathroom and there was Kaiba, washing his hands at the sink, the dead body between them. _'This is your mess,'_ said Kaiba. _'I'm not going to clean it up. But if you submit the proper paperwork, I will reimburse you for the cleaning expenses.' Kaiba looked at him. 'The deadline is the last Thursday of the month. Don't forget.'_

Jounouchi woke again. He breathed in slowly, breathed out. His skin felt cooler than when last he woke. He checked his phone.

4pm, and no messages. Not even Takeda.

Jounouchi considered. He felt like he hadn't woken up yet. He was still asleep, surely, and the morning was still to come. He had been awake for so long, hadn't he, going to those parties, and seeing Kaiba, and that secretary – _what was her name?_ – and he wasn't awake yet…

He hadn't even changed out of his clothes. He had nowhere to go tonight. He had cash, but all of that had to go to Takeda. And he was short. And there was nowhere else for him to go. He knew the ending of every street and the ending of every sentence Takeda or Sugata would ever say to him. It was all already over.

And then, like he was still dreaming, Jounouchi's hand went back to his pocket, like he had déjà vu, and he felt inside the lining, past the feather soft lint against his fingertips, and he moved against something flat and matte shiny. He pulled it out.

The card was immaculate white. A logo he recognised but could not exactly place dominated the bottom right. The bottom left text read a US address and, in the centre, a phone number was haloed by a name and position.

 _Michael Tanner._

 _CEO_.

Jounouchi tapped his fingertips against the card. His nails were tar-black, somehow, once again. He had only just washed them, hadn't he? In the bathroom, with Mai — no, Ayako. She would be alone now. She would be hating him like Mai did, like Mai had probably done in secret for months before she left him. He deserved that. He was nothing. He would never be anything. He never had been.

The card was, if nothing else, a possibility. And he had so few of those. What other possibilities remained to him? Kaiba, curled over his laptop, nothing but the whetstone of his work to keep him alive. Ayako, maybe crying somewhere, maybe sharpening a switchblade for him, it didn't matter. Takeda, with his throat full of sand, the mummy, who would come for him one day in the night, and put his fingers around his throat.

His phone screen gleamed at him as he dialled. Tanner was Kaiba's Takeda. Tanner was Kaiba's death.

It was ludicrous, calling an American billionaire who had given him his business card in a moment of intoxicated camaraderie, and expecting an answer. No one was that lucky.

 _I'm that lucky._

' _Hola_.'

The voice was old, rough, smoke-wretched like Takeda's was, like his father's had been, like his would be one day. Jounouchi recognised something so intimate and primal in that wasted quality. It was like decay itself was winding into his ears and scratching at him. It was like home and it was like dying. He missed his dad.

' _Yo, Micky, it's_ Jounouchi.'

The voice at the other end breathed in and out, trying to place him, confused but not questioning why. The kind of man that was comfortable with confusion, who lacked humility and any capacity for self-doubt.

' _The coke guy_ ,' Jounouchi clarified. And then, with bile and irony, ' _Kaiba's friend_.'

'Ah-h-h!' The thin sound of breathing in and out like around a cigarette. ' _Yeah,_ Jo-Jo _. You got me at just the right time, kiddo, I was just_ …' The words cascaded on too quickly for Jounouchi to follow, that broad accented American around which he had watched Kaiba tiptoe, like someone eating fast food with ivory chopsticks. ' _You get me? You understand?_ '

'Eh, _say it again?_ '

The man laughed and said something foreign and abrasive and rude that made Jounouchi feel the same way Kaiba made him feel, alone and hated and wrong and weak. ' _Bring me that good stuff, I'll text you an address._ ' And he hung up, and that was that. Jounouchi stared at his phone for a moment. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the way out. He'd be the intermediary between Takeda and a ring of billionaires and he'd make enough money to leave this awful town and he could find somewhere warm in the sunlight…

Jounouchi hurled himself off the mattress. He needed to eat. He used to love food. He used to be so hungry all the time for everything, just trying to stuff life down his throat, and now hours could slip by and he would forget his meals. bought three packets of chips from the vending machine downstairs and stuffed them into his pockets, remembering violently the apple in his dream, and feeling like vegetables would rot if he put them to his lips.

He rode the underground to the address Tanner had given him, unsure what to expect, realising he might be walking into something different, something violent. Tanner was dangerous. He'd known that from the moment the man had walked into the room, that casual comfort with everybody's hyper-aware anxiety, from the way he talked about women, from the broken glass in his smile. The address was a part of downtown he didn't know and the streets were empty, not filled with the lost and homeless like the warehouse district but totally barren. He saw a security guard pacing outside one building and a dog watching him from an alley. He watched the dog back. It was big and black, not the kind of mutt you'd expect to find running loose downtown, and it looked at him with hunger and recognition.

Jounouchi walked away from the dog and prayed that it didn't follow him.

The address brought him to a flight of concrete steps that took him down to a jet black door. He could hear the beat of weird electric music on the other side of it. He knocked.

The door opened. A strange pin-thin man with long gleaming hair pulled into a ponytail loomed out of the darkness. A pencil goatee was sketched around his mouth. His lips retracted to reveal meth addict teeth. Jounouchi felt like he was going to die.

'Tanner's boy.'

'Uh.' There was an ambiguity in the categorisation that Jounouchi didn't like, but that could just be his paranoia eating at him. 'Yeah. Is he…'

The doorman jerked his head. Jounouchi made out a tattoo on his neck: an uyoku dantai gang symbol, the kind he'd once learned, long ago, to avoid at sight. Sensing his hesitation, the doorman bared his teeth again, his eyes pulsed, and he wiggled a skeletal finger down into the dark corridor beyond.

'First on the left.'

Jounouchi stepped into the dark and the door slammed behind him. _Bakura handing him a skull._

He walked gingerly along, one hand trailing the wall, until his eyes adjusted and he could make out the thin light creeping under a door on the left. He could see nothing else. The sound of music grew louder, hollow thumping music that felt like having a panic attack, and voices. One he recognised.

He opened the door.

Tanner's voice exploded into the air like a grenade and the music washed over him.

' _And I fucking swear, I said to him – and you know I'm a joker, you know me, Han – I said that I wouldn't take his offer, and that night I took his wife instead. And she cried like it was Christmas._ '

The room was dark in every corner, with luminescent neon blue bulbs blooming like fat mushrooms on the tables. It vaguely resembled a strip club, but there was only one woman on the stage, and there was nothing erotic about the strange swaying dance she did around the single pole. The area in which he stood was separated from the rest of the club by a rail and two security guards. The music crowded into his ears like maggots.

'Ah!' Tanner noticed the new guest and rose to greet him. He wore a pale blue suit with a black shirt, his neck and wrists emblazoned in jewellery, like he'd been sleeping in a coffin in Miami since 1984 and had only just emerged. Four other American men sat around him, three in suits, one in a leather jacket whose skin crawled with tattoos Jounouchi wished he didn't recognise. Tanner smiled at him like a rotting sunflower. 'Jo-Jo! _My saviour_. Oh-hi-yo!' He pulled Jounouchi into a hug and his skin was sticky. Tanner clapped his shoulder. ' _You know,_ Jo-Jo _, I've been in this awful fucking country for three days and I can't score a single ounce of anything stronger than fucking Stevia_.'

Jounouchi grinned at him with all his teeth and all his soul. ' _Here to help_ ,' he said, and hated how the English felt in his mouth. All the men laughed and he wanted to throw up. He realised he had no idea how to ask for payment. But Tanner was a demon with a strange mercy.

' _Pay the kid. Whatever the fuck five grand is in this country's bullshit currency_.'

One of the men who had _0911_ and _1488_ emblazoned on his knuckles handed Jounouchi an envelope. Jounouchi took it, dumb, and looked inside. It was too much. He said nothing. He slipped it into his coat and nodded his thank you and wondered if he could leave, if the throat he'd crawled through would be so kind to cough him back up again…

' _Sit down,_ Jo-Jo! _So good to have you and Kaiba to keep me company again. I feel really welcomed_.'

Jounouchi was sure he had misheard. This was impossible. Real life wasn't like this.

He hadn't noticed him at first. Kaiba was leaning back in the deep of the shadows, barely visible, a pale glyph. He stared at Jounouchi. Jounouchi stared back.

 _Oh god,_ Jounouchi thought, _we've died. We've died and this is hell. That's what's going on. We're in hell._

And then he thought, _You were in my dream._ And he knew Kaiba was thinking the same thing.

Jounouchi sat. Kaiba was wearing those black leather or latex style trousers he had once so favoured, and his shirt was a dark silk blue. But his face was drained. His eyes tracked Jounouchi like one of them were prey, and Jounouchi did not know which.

Jounouchi had never wanted to leave a place more in his life. A woman who was, he realised with a start, entirely naked brought him a glass of champagne. A confused spike of lust jumped within him, and then Jounouchi wanted Mai to hold him so bad he thought he might cry. He drank quickly. The woman on stage below was swaying like she was underwater, back and forth, back and forth, her skin glittery, her eyes wide and unseeing. He felt vaguely like he might be having a heart attack.

He couldn't follow the conversation. Kaiba said nothing. Tanner talked until he got bored, then the other men would exchange clipped sentences about owing money and ex-girlfriends and child support and visa problems, and then Tanner would bring himself back into the fray and the other men's conversation would recede politely.

Then Tanner said something vile and dumb and racist to Kaiba, only the gist of which caught Jounouchi's ears, like barbed wire. A weird kind of inward smile crawled up the corner of Kaiba's mouth and disappeared into his face, and for a moment Jounouchi thought the joke had been at his expense. But he could read from Tanner's jackal laugh and the way he pointed the ashy cigarette at Kaiba that the joke had been _at_ , not _with_ , Kaiba, and yet here was Kaiba smiling at it, if only for a moment, in that ghostly way. Tanner hit Kaiba on the back like they were friends, which they weren't, and suddenly Jounouchi felt like there was something even worse and _other_ going on here that didn't belong to him.

And then an idea struck him. An awful idea. And it was only in his head because Tanner was like Takeda, who was like his dad, who was like a legion of dead old men that had raised them and used them and wrung them out for money and coke and love.

He tapped Tanner's arm and spoke his first words since entering this place. 'Yo, _did you know_ Kaiba Gozaburo?'

The leech smile dropped dead from Kaiba's mouth. His eyes were full of ice.

' _Fuck yeah, I knew_ Gozaburo _. We went back to the old days. Fuck! I miss that old bastard. Threw himself out of a window. How does a thing like that happen?_ '

Jounouchi nodded along. He could feel Kaiba watching him. ' _My dad died this year_ ,' he told Tanner, imparting this information like it was just the kind of thing you told people like him. Like you'd list off your receipts to the reaper.

Something empty that had the shape and consistency of compassion settled in Tanner's features like the ash shapes of Pompeii. ' _Sorry to hear that,_ Jo-Jo! _Kaiba, how old were you when old G kicked it? Seventeen?_ '

' _Fifteen.'_

' _God! You were so young back then. I remember those days so clear_. _Just like yesterday. Days go by!_ ' Tanner pulled out a matte black credit card and neatened up a line. ' _Same as it ever was_.'

He offered the coke to Jounouchi and Jounouchi, his hands moving like in a dream, took the card and did a line and leaned back. His heart soared and his blood jumped around his body. Kaiba stared at him.

'Want to duel?' he shouted in Japanese across the table. Kaiba didn't respond. Jounouchi shrugged. 'Your loss.'

' _I made microchips for G_ ,' said Tanner, speaking in that slow exaggerated manner he always did to Jounouchi. ' _For weapons. Big ones. But_ Kaiba _junior wanted to make toys and video games, and they needed microchips too, so here we still are. More money in the military if I'm honest, but I value loyalty._ ' He breathed in cigarette smoke and his mouth poured it over Jounouchi. ' _Are you loyal,_ Jo-Jo?'

Jounouchi thought of Yuugi in a burning building. He thought of Yuugi on the other side of that anchor. He thought of Yami Malik's screaming, laughing face as he hit unconsciousness. Yes, he was loyal.

' _Always_.'

Tanned laughed with the sound of a sinkhole collapsing and slapped Jounouchi's thigh and said something so relentlessly fucking stupid and racist that Jounouchi felt it slide right the way through him. He accepted another glass of champagne from the naked woman and watched, unfeeling, empty, as a woman (the same one?) got down on her knees in front of Tanner and took his half-hard cock into her mouth. Jounouchi watched this and frowned, not really sure what he should feel, and he looked to Kaiba for some kind of hint as to the etiquette. Everything was operating on so many levels of absurdity above real life that he was fairly sure he was asleep again.

But Kaiba was standing, leaving the table. Jounouchi stood as well, at least free to wander without Tanner stopping him, and followed the familiar childhood figure through the club into the bathrooms. Once the door shut behind them Kaiba turned to look back, his face annoyed, disgusted, sallow, the music barely muffled.

'Why are you here?' said Kaiba.

'Why are _you_ here?'

'I'm using the bathroom, if you don't object.'

'I mean, why are you in this club?'

'I'm here on business.'

'No you're not. You're lying.' Jounouchi breathed in sharply. 'We're in hell, that's what this place is. We died and we're being punished. That's what's happening. I figured it out.'

'We're not in hell.'

'You look dead.'

'Have you seen what _you_ look like?' said Kaiba, suddenly savage, and piano wire fingers curled around Jounouchi's arm and flipped him to face the mirror behind them. Jounouchi looked. Two things that used to be boys looked back at him.

Jounouchi yanked his arm away. 'Don't touch me.'

He wanted to hit him. He wanted to hurt him. If he killed Kaiba, then the link would be severed and he would be free. It would be over. He'd wake up at Yuugi's on the floor, and it would be a school night, and he still hadn't done his homework…

'I bet Yuugi is _delighted_ to be free of you,' said Kaiba, his voice strained over the music, which was screaming, and Jounouchi felt that anger heating within him. He remembered calling Mai a bitch. He remembered his dad dead on the floor and Bakura, again, handing him a skull.

He hadn't expected Kaiba to hit him first. It didn't hurt; it was an open slap, unpractised, awkward and clear. The beat of the slap quietened in the air and Kaiba stared at him, something like surprise in his face, and Jounouchi hesitated. In that moment he considered if Kaiba was, really, _worth it._ Was Kaiba worth a street-brawl with Honda, roughhousing with kiddie gangs who were playing dress up for when they dropped out of school and had to make the gangs their life? Or was Kaiba worth killing?

In some deep black part of him, two great cogs shifted and a decision was made. Jounouchi's shoulder dropped and his fist went forth. There was a crack. Kaiba's face erupted in red.

Jounouchi blinked and the world resettled.

Kaiba was slumped on the floor. His expression was topaz and marble, blue and green and hard, and his eyes were white magma. Blood dripped from his face.

'I'm going home now,' Jounouchi said. 'I'm done. This is finished.'

He left the bathroom. The woman on the stage was still dancing, watching him, eyes black like that dog, and he knew Tanner was watching him too. He was certain as he walked through the club that every person inside was watching him, jealous and hungry, ready to eat. He kept his eyes to the floor and walked through the club, the awful music swallowing up any speech, any approaching footsteps.

He reached the door and shoved through into the black corridor beyond, finding his way through the blindness purely by memory. He found the exit and yanked at it, freeing himself, spilling dismal wet daylight into the club.

He had forgotten about the doorman, who was shuffling a deck of cards. A deck of – Duel Monsters? Jounouchi could have sworn that's what they were, but he didn't turn back.

'We hope to see you again, Jo-Jo,' called the doorman, but Jounouchi didn't reply. He pushed out into the outside where it was raining hard and cold like it had been that night he first met Kaiba. He was out. He wasn't in hell yet. He wasn't dead yet.


End file.
